Eyes on You

The Replay

My bedroom had never felt so quiet.

Outside, the rain from the afternoon was still falling, tapping a steady, rhythmic beat against my windowpane. The sky had bruised into a deep, dusky purple, casting long, cool shadows across my floor. I was lying flat on my back on my bed, staring up at the ceiling fan as its blades slowly cut through the heavy air.

My headphones were on, the volume turned up just loud enough to drown out the muffled sounds of the rest of the house. A slow, moody song was playing, the melody perfectly matching the swirling, restless feeling expanding in my chest.

I was supposed to be doing my homework. My math textbook was lying open next to me, the pages completely ignored. Because no matter how hard I tried to focus on the numbers and equations, my mind kept dragging me right back to the third row of the French classroom.

I hit rewind in my head. I played the moment over again.

The pen dropping. The rustle of cotton uniforms. Him turning around. The exact fraction of a second when his eyes bypassed the girl sitting behind me and locked onto mine.

I squeezed my eyes shut, letting out a long, shaky breath, and rolled over to bury my flushed face in my pillow. It was just three seconds. If I looked at a clock, three seconds was absolutely nothing—just a blip in time. But in my head, I had stretched that tiny fragment into a feature-length film. I analyzed the casual slant of his shoulders, the specific, unreadable focus in his eyes in the dim classroom light, and the way the rest of the room had just melted away into pure static.

Desperate for a distraction, I reached for my laptop at the foot of the bed and flipped it open. The sudden blue light washed over my dark room. I loaded up the historical drama I had been binge-watching all week. Usually, the complex palace politics, the elaborate costumes, and the sweeping, slow-burn romance were more than enough to completely pull me out of my own reality.

I rested the laptop on my stomach and watched the subtitled dialogue flash across the bottom of the screen as two characters shared a tense, unspoken look across a crowded royal court.

But tonight, it wasn't working. Even the most dramatic, high-stakes betrayals couldn't hold my attention. Every time the characters on screen stole a glance at each other, my brain immediately superimposed his face over the scene. The cinematic tension I was watching was nothing compared to the electric jolt I had felt when his eyes met mine.

I let out a frustrated sigh, pushing the laptop aside, and pulled my personal notebook toward me instead.

I couldn't just leave all this frantic energy trapped inside my head; it felt like it was going to shatter my ribs. I grabbed a pen, clicked it open, and let the emotions bleed out onto the blank paper. I didn't write a standard diary entry. Instead, I started stringing together lines and rhymes, trying to write lyrics that could somehow contain the exact, terrifying thrill of being noticed.

The noise fades out, the room goes still,

A sudden drop, a quiet thrill.

You turned around and found my eyes,

And caught me in a sweet surprise.

I crossed words out, scribbled over lines, and rewrote them in the margins, letting the rhythm of the music in my headphones guide the ink. For hours, as the rain continued to hit the glass and the bedroom grew entirely dark, I just sat cross-legged on my mattress. I poured every ounce of that intoxicating, dangerous false hope into verses about a boy whose name I had only just learned ‘Bhavya.’ I repeated the name over and over in my head, carving it into my memory. Having his name made it so much worse. It made him real. He suddenly took up twice as much space in my head, and I couldn't undo it