✤ Sera ✤
Campus was a mess of rushing footsteps, backpacks slapping against shoulders, and frantic students who looked two wrong breaths away from collapsing. Midterm week created a very specific kind of chaos, the kind that made even the calmest people look like stressed pigeons. I was one of them. Or at least, that’s what it must have looked like from the outside. Inside, I still carried that warm ache from that feeling of being wanted, of being seen, of being held in a space that felt almost unreal. But none of that mattered right now because I was late. Again. I clutched my notebook to my chest and picked up my pace as I hurried across the campus courtyard toward the West Hall study rooms. My study group would kill me if I was late one more time, and the only reason I had agreed to jo
