For three days, I did absolutely nothing. Which sounds remarkably easy on the surface, but in reality, it was an incredibly exhausting exercise in self-restraint.

Every single time I mindlessly opened the application on my phone, her name appeared somewhere on the screen. It wasn’t because she had posted a new photograph or updated her status—her account remained completely quiet and private. It was simply the persistent digital confirmation that my request had been accepted. That tiny, subtle shift in our status was enough to create a massive, entirely new problem for my overthinking brain.

Now, a message box existed. And because the option to send a message was physically there, I couldn’t stop my mind from looping on exactly what that message should say.

The first draft lasted all of twelve seconds.

Hi.

I stared blankly at the single word against the white background. *Too blunt,* I thought, my chest tightening. *It looks like a random, accidental tap. Or worse, it looks like I’m expecting her to carry the entire conversation from scratch.* I deleted it instantly.

The second draft survived slightly longer.

Hello. How are you?

I hovered my thumb over the screen, critiquing it with a frown. *No. This sounds like a generic email template or a formal greeting from a stranger. We’ve shared a back-row and a front-row view for an entire year; asking ‘how are you’ out of nowhere feels forced and entirely unnatural.* I cleared the text box again.

The third attempt never even reached a full sentence. Every phrase I constructed felt wrong. Everything sounded strange, alternating between being too stiff and formal or completely random and obvious.

Eventually, out of pure frustration, I tossed my phone across the mattress and forced myself to turn back to my engineering manuals. At least theoretical equations had clear, definitive answers. Human interactions completely lacked a logical framework.

The next final exam paper arrived with a frantic rush, followed immediately by the preparation for the next. The days began to blend together into a heavy, continuous cycle. Wake up. Stare at notes until my eyes burned. Drive to the exam hall. Write code and formulas for three hours. Come home. Repeat.

The overall exhaustion of the season was completely consuming. The strange thing about final examination season was how quickly the pressure managed to delete every other topic from the campus. Nobody stood around the corridors talking about the graduation farewell anymore. Nobody discussed future plans or post-college placements. Every single conversation between the desks was reduced to passing marks, syllabus cuts, and predicting important questions. Nothing else mattered.

Even seeing Ava in the examination hall felt entirely different now. There was no casual ambient noise, no lingering moments near the window row, and no slow transition before the bell. Everyone arrived carrying a massive amount of stress, dropped their bags, wrote their papers, and vanished from the building the exact second they were allowed to leave.

Still, despite the academic panic, my brain never failed to notice her. It wasn’t because I was deliberately searching the rows anymore; it was just that after an entire year, registering her presence had become an involuntary habit.

One hot afternoon, after pulling through a brutal theory paper, I sat at my desk at home staring at the blank chat window again. It was the exact same loop. The same empty text box, the same hesitation, and the same agonizing overanalysis.

Then, a new strategy appeared in my head. It wasn’t a brilliant, creative idea, but it was easily the least terrible option available.

Notes.

Engineering students asked each other for study materials all the time. It was the most normal, reasonable, and safe interaction possible on a campus. Most importantly, it gave me a functional, completely unarguable reason to initiate contact.

I spent nearly ten minutes deciding how to phrase a single, casual sentence about reference notes. Ten full minutes of processing capacity for one basic line.

Eventually, I let out a soft, bitter laugh at my own absurdity, typed the words out before my defensive walls could rebuild, and finally pressed the send button. I kept it strictly professional—just a simple request asking if her group happened to have the clean reference printouts for the upcoming final embedded systems paper. Nothing more, nothing less.

The text bubble left my screen instantly. Unfortunately, whatever small trace of confidence I had built up went right along with it.

For the next hour, I checked the status of the chat more times than I would ever dare admit to another living human being.

No reply.

I forcefully shoved the phone into a desk drawer and tried to focus on my remaining revision sheets. The final grades were undeniably more important than a digital chat, and the message could easily wait. At least, that was the practical lie I kept feeding myself to keep my hands from shaking.

By the next morning, the status remained completely unchanged. Still no reply.

The silence didn’t actively bother me immediately. I used basic logic to calm my nerves—people were incredibly busy during finals week. Everyone was locked away in deep study routines, ignoring distractions to cram for the remaining papers. It was completely reasonable.

So, I accepted the explanation and pushed it into the back of my mind, focusing on my own work.

A few more days rolled past in a blur of late-night revision, heavy reference books, and far more black coffee than was probably healthy for my system.

And still, the message box remained entirely silent.

This time, the lack of a response stayed stuck in my thoughts much longer, refusing to clear out. My mind immediately began constructing a fresh set of hypotheses to explain the data.

Maybe she just hasn’t opened the application. That happens all the time.

Maybe she keeps her notifications turned off entirely during exam weeks to stay focused. That’s a smart habit.

Maybe she saw it, got distracted by her study group, and planned to reply later.

Maybe she’s just entirely focused on surviving the final term.

Every single explanation sounded perfectly believable, which was both comforting and incredibly frustrating. The hardest part of the silence wasn’t the fear of a polite rejection. A flat rejection would have been a definitive answer—a clear boundary I could process and accept. But silence wasn’t an answer at all. Silence was just an empty room filled with unresolvable questions.

One rainy evening, while reviewing a difficult schematic diagram for the next morning’s paper, I realized I had been staring at the exact same paragraph for nearly ten minutes without absorbing a single word. My mind had slipped right back to the campus.

*Had I simply waited too long to say something?* the quiet thought drifted through my head. *Probably.* *Should I have just crossed the floor and spoken to her at the farewell party?* *Undeniably, yes.* *Should I have broken the ice months ago during a normal lab practical?* *Absolutely.*

The retrospective questions were completely unhelpful, offering zero solutions, but they kept arriving anyway, crashing against my focus.

The next exam day came and went, and then the one after it. The number of remaining papers on our schedule grew smaller, the absolute end of our college life drew closer, and the chat window remained completely frozen in time. Sometimes, during a study break, I’d open the thread, stare at my own sent sentence for a few seconds, and close it again with a sigh. The words never changed, and the quiet never broke.

One late afternoon, after walking out of the main hall following our second-to-last paper, I saw Ava leaving the concrete building alongside her usual group of friends.

They were walking slowly down the steps, laughing softly about a question that had appeared on the test sheet. She looked completely normal, entirely at peace, and entirely focused on navigating her own real life.

I stood near the edge of the corridor, watching them disappear into the thick crowd of seniors heading toward the gates, before forcing myself to look away.

The sudden realization stung much more than I had expected it to. It wasn’t because she had done anything wrong—she hadn’t. She was completely blameless. It was the humbling, cold awareness that for almost an entire year, this person had occupied a massive, permanent space inside my mind, while she remained beautifully unaware that that space even existed.

And that was easily the strangest, most painful part about one-sided feelings. The other person could continue living their life exactly as they always had, moving forward through the days, while you carried around the heavy weight of a thousand silent conversations that had never actually happened.

That night, I checked the screen one final time before turning off my desk lamp. Nothing had changed.

I placed the phone face down on the wooden table and flipped the switch, letting the room plunge into total darkness. The space fell entirely silent around me.

But for the first time in months, I wasn’t carrying the familiar anxiety of trying to figure out what to say. The digital script had already been sent; the word was out there in the ether.

Now, the only variables left were the final few papers and the agonizing stretch of the wait. And as an overthinker who liked immediate logic, waiting had never been one of my strengths.