Serene....
They always ask me if I was lonely. I wasn't. Not then.
I was just a foreign student in a new country, trying to keep my life stitched together. The days were long, the money was short, and sleep was a luxury I didn't always afford. But it was my life. And for the first time in a long time, it was mine alone.
I lived in a shared apartment with cracked tiles and a temperamental boiler. My roommate snored, the ceiling leaked when it rained, and the window didn't quite close — but I loved it. I woke up every morning before sunrise, wrapped myself in my thickest sweater, and took the tram to campus with a thermos of instant coffee and the scent of last night's onion in my scarf.
I worked two jobs. One at a quiet bookstore tucked into a side street, where old women came for romance novels and children begged for stickers. The owner let me take damaged books home, and I kept a stack of them beside my mattress like a little shrine. My second job was at a small café near the university. Loud jazz, too much foam, and barely enough pay to justify the swollen ankles. But it paid my rent. Paid for rice. Paid for the silence I so badly needed.
Classes were heavy. My professors didn't slow down for my accent or my exhaustion, but I didn't care. I was doing it — studying in a language not mine, surviving in a city not mine, building a future that could be mine.
Sometimes I missed home. Missed the reckless laughter of my sisters, the smell of charcoal smoke and red dust, the chaos of a house always too full. But I didn't miss being watched. I didn't miss being told what I was allowed to wear. Who I could be. I didn't miss the way even my thoughts felt policed.
Here, I was no one.
And I liked it.
---
There was a man who came into the café sometimes. Quiet. Well-dressed. Always with a little girl who sat perfectly still and never touched her drink. They never stayed long. They never smiled. But I always felt their eyes on me.
I told myself it was nothing.
Customers stare. People notice. I'm not invisible anymore. That's all.
I was wrong.
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