chapter 4
280 Words
it started with a torn piece of paper from the back of my Biology note.
Just a sentence.
Nothing deep.
“I’m sorry I didn’t listen.”
I folded it four times and tucked it into my pillowcase.
I don’t know why I wrote it. Maybe I thought he’d read it from wherever he was.
Maybe I just needed to say it somewhere that wasn’t inside my own head.
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
So I got up and tore more pages.
Wrote down every thought I couldn’t say out loud:
Today I saw someone who looked like you. I stared too long. He noticed.
Mum called. I didn’t pick.
There’s a smell in the hostel that reminds me of the hospital. It makes my chest hurt.
By the end of the week, I had a full envelope of folded regrets.
I started calling it my “black book,” even though it wasn’t a book and it wasn’t black.
Just crumpled paper with shaky handwriting and feelings too sharp to swallow.
I hid them under my mattress.
Right under the corner where the bunk creaks when I roll over.
No one knew.
Not even Tomi, who had started to watch me with the kind of quiet curiosity I usually had for other people.
The journal became the only place I could be honest.
Where I didn’t have to pretend I was fine.
Where I could admit I still heard his voice some nights.
“If only you could have heard…”
Some mornings, I forgot to fold the last page.
And I’d wake up in panic, imagining someone had seen it.
But no one ever did.
Except maybe… him.
- Writer
