I would choose you

Study group

Once a week, we all gathered in the boys’ room for our unofficial philosophy tutorials.

They started as a joke. The lectures with Professor M. were so slow, so fragmented, that by the end of the second week most of us had more questions than notes. Abraham offered sweetly and sincerely to “recap the basics” one evening. That one evening turned into a tradition.

That night was no exception. We arrived just after dinner, climbing the narrow stairs of the west dormitory, arms full of tea, biscuits, notebooks. The hallway smelled faintly of tobacco and soap, and the boys’ room, spacious by dorm standards divided between the three of them, was already warm with yellow light.

Arthur and August had pushed two of the desks together to make room for cushions and chairs. Abraham stood by the window, sipping tea from a chipped mug with Arabic script on the side. He smiled when we came in, then gestured to the half-circle of mismatched seats.

“Let’s get started,” he said. “Tonight: determinism and absurdism. Which is to say: everything you don’t want to think about when you’re tired.”

We laughed and settled in. Arthur flung himself dramatically across a beanbag and declared, “I am ready to absorb the truth of the universe through osmosis.”

Abraham rolled his eyes affectionately and began.

“Okay,” he said, “imagine you’re a fish.”

Pause.

“Now imagine you’re a fish in a river. Every time you move, you think you’re choosing something. But really, the current is dragging you the whole time. That’s determinism.”

Laughter.

Arthur raised his hand. “What if the fish is, like, very determined?”

“Then he still drowns,” Abraham said. “Because the water doesn’t care.”

We laughed again.

“Absurdism,” he continued, “is different. Absurdism is what happens when the fish realizes the river has no destination.”

I watched him speak—calm, steady, hands moving slightly as he talked. He made everything sound easy, even when it wasn’t. He had a quiet authority, the kind that came from understanding, not performance.

English wasn’t even his third language. He also spoke Arabic and French, and he often read philosophy in the original text: Nietzsche in German, Camus in French. And yet he never made us feel small, never bragged. He was the best student in our class, and he spent one evening a week slowing everything down just for us.

I was listening to him and thinking, that could’ve been doing anything else. For example, having dinner with that girl from the philosophy faculty he always sat with. But instead he made jokes about existential fish and brewed us tea from bags he brought from home.

Arthur interrupted just as Abraham was writing “Sartre” on the whiteboard.

“Sorry,” he said, raising a hand. “But I need to know—do we think the fish is hot?”

Hannah groaned. Maria snorted. Nicole raised one eyebrow and laughed. I also laughed, despite myself.

“Because,” Arthur continued, “I think I would make a great nihilist trout.”

“You’d be an eel,” August said from the corner.

“A sexy eel?”

“Sure.”

We all laughed. Even Abraham smiled, shaking his head as he erased the board.

That was Arthur’s gift. He came from a wealthy family - everyone knew it, though he never mentioned it, but he never made anyone feel beneath him. His jokes never punched down. He just liked making people laugh, and somehow his timing was always perfect.

August was different.

He sat on the windowsill, his legs stretched out in front of him, the neck of his guitar resting in one hand. He rarely said much during these sessions. Sometimes he nodded. Sometimes he furrowed his brow. But mostly he watched, and listened, and kept his thoughts to himself.

All I knew about him was this: he liked depressing philosophy. Determinism, fatalism, pessimism. He once muttered something about Kierkegaard being “underrated,” and I still wasn’t sure if he was joking.

Lately, I’d noticed him sitting next to Violet during classes. She never joined us for study group, though. She said it was “too crowded", which, coming from her, meant “too human.”

August never said much about anything.

After Abraham finished his lecture, August pulled his guitar into his lap and began to play. A low, soft melody, melancholy but beautiful. It filled the room like smoke. No one asked what it was. We just listened.

I leaned back in my seat and looked around.

Hannah sat cross-legged on the floor beside me, scribbling something in her notebook. My best friend. My anchor. She still met with Professor T. once a week for their “private lessons.” Nothing inappropriate had happened , at least that's wha told me, and I believed her, but the way she talked about him still was very clear she is in love about him. She adored him. Worshipped him, even. And I get it, it really is hard to resist his charms.

Maria sat beside Nicole. They were nearly inseparable now. Roommates turned best friends, just like me and Hannah. Maria was kind, sharp, endlessly diligent. She didn’t speak much during the sessions, but when she did, it was thoughtful. She and I got along fine, but we only really talked when the four of us - me, Maria, Nicole, and Hannah spent time together.

Nicole.

We weren’t best friends. Not like me and Hannah. But we had something else. A quiet bond. A rhythm.

We studied together in the library most evenings. Sometimes we said nothing at all, just sat side by side, scribbling in our notebooks, occasionally sipping tea. But those silences were the best kind. Comfortable. Full.

And when we did talk, it felt like unwrapping something delicate and beautiful. Every word precise, every glance meaningful.

I’d learned how to read her without needing her to speak. I could tell when she was tired, when she was bored, when a sentence in a book made her smile. Her face didn’t change much, but her eyes did. They held whole languages.

And I never felt more understood than when I was sitting next to her, saying nothing at all.

The lecture ended, and we clapped for Abraham like we always did. A little too enthusiastically and loud, but we were truly grateful. He blushed and waved us off, as usual.

“You are all ridiculous,” he said, laughing.

“Thank you for your service,” Arthur said solemnly, standing and bowing like an actor.

Then he brightened.

“Okay,” he added, “but seriously, why do we never do anything fun all together? I mean, come on. We see each other every day. We dissect the death of God together. And yet not once have we played cards.”

He pulled a deck from his jacket pocket and held it high like a magician.

“Don’t pretend you weren’t waiting for me to save this night.”

We all groaned, but no one left.

Maria moved a pile of books to clear the floor. Hannah set up a circle of cushions. Nicole gave me a look that I think meant “we’re doing this, then.”

Arthur dealt with theatrical flair. The game was stupid: something like bullshit or president or some half-invented hybrid, but we laughed the whole way through.

Abraham, terrible at lying, lost every round. Maria kept accidentally skipping her own turn. Nicole, quietly ruthless, won again and again. Only August didn’t join.

He stayed on the windowsill, playing quietly. Then, after a while, he set the guitar aside, went to his desk, and began to write.

The rest of us kept playing. Joking. Laughing.

The room felt full.

Full of people I was starting to care about.

An hour passed before anyone noticed the time. Maria glanced at her watch and sighed. “I have a paper due in seven hours.”

“Let’s never study again,” Hannah mumbled.

We packed up slowly. Gathered our bags, finished the last of the tea.

Nicole slipped her coat on beside me and whispered, “You’re not as bad at cards as I expected.”

“I’m full of surprises,” I whispered back.

“It was fun.”

I lingered behind as the others said their goodbyes.

As I passed August’s desk on the way out, I glanced down, casually.

He was still writing. A letter.

I saw only a few words, my eyes catching on the name at the top before he quickly flipped the page over.

Violet.

He didn’t look up.

I smiled faintly. “Goodnight.”

“Night,” he murmured.

I closed the door behind me and stepped out into the hallway, the sound of his guitar still humming in the back of my mind.

And I thought - not for the first time - that silence could be the loudest thing in the world. And that it was nice to have friends.