7
They said Leo truly broke down on the third day after I left.
He tore apart every little restaurant we had ever eaten at, terrifying the owners.
He claimed I had left a hairpin behind, and he had to find it.
But I had never worn a hairpin to any of those places.
The comments scrolled by in a dizzying blur:
[He’s lost it. He’s trying to find a hairpin you never even lost!]
[Is he sick? He was in the bathroom, holding a cup you drank from and drinking out of it…]
[Mia, come back. He’s really dying…]
But I was thousands of miles away in a city by the sea, basking in the sun and gently applying sunscreen.
Jazz music played in my earbuds as I edited the abstract for a paper I was submitting to an international journal.
The sound of waves drifted up from the balcony, and my new cat jumped onto my lap, rubbing against me.
My phone vibrated. It was a screenshot from my old roommate.
[Your ex–boyfriend… I think he’s really losing it…]
In the screenshot, a post on the campus forum had gone viral.
The title was:
“Leo has completely lost his mind over a breakup! Kneeling outside the lecture hall, crying and repeating her name…”
Someone replied in the thread.
“He said, ‘If she doesn’t come back, I don’t want to live either.“”
“He plastered all the places they used to go with sentences she wrote. He even copied the words wrong, crying like a child.”
“…How can that girl, Mia, be so heartless?”
The comments in my head were still there:
[He’s sick, Mia. Stop hiding.]
[Do you know that when he gets drunk, he recites your driver’s license number..]
(He thinks you’re waiting for him to chase after you, so he’s trying to buy plane tickets and look up your exchange program recor- ds…)
12:19
Chapter 2
[If you don’t go back, he’s really… going to do something to himself.]
And at that very moment, I was calmly emailing my new advisor to report on my project’s progress.
That night, I went for a walk on the beach by myself.
The wind was strong, so cold it felt like it was freezing my eyelashes.
I stood by the shore for a while, and suddenly I remembered that winter years ago, when I stood on the athletic field just like this.
Leo had a fever that day. I brought him medicine and he shut the door in my face.
He had said, “Stop bothering me.”
I had laughed then and said, “I’m not bothering you. I just like you.”
Thinking back on it now, how pathetic was that?
The love I thought I had was just a hallucination, fed to me by the comments.
At one in the morning, a new post popped up on my feed.
It was Leo. A photo of the back of his hand, covered in bloody scratches.
The caption:
“That day, you said you were done waiting. I know you’re a person who means what they say.”
No one liked it. The comments were sparse.
The voices in my head went insane again:
[He scratched his hand just to feel if he was still alive…]
[He really can’t hold on anymore… Mia, he’s going to die…]
[Stop torturing him. He really, really knows he was wrong…]
I stared at the picture for a long time.
Then, I quietly rnuted his feed.
The next day, I went to class as usual.
Sunlight streamed into the classroom, landing in a neat, warm square on my desk.
I opened my notebook and wrote:
“All roads back have collapsed.”
