I stayed like that for a while—lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, letting my thoughts spin in circles until they started to blur together.
Ethan.
The girl.
Chloe.
Everything kept mixing in my head in a way that made me tired just thinking about it.
I turned onto my side with a quiet sigh.
And that's when something small, almost forgotten, drifted into my mind.
Stories.
I used to read a lot of them.
Not school stuff. Not assignments.
Actual stories.
Romance, drama, random college life fiction I used to get lost in when I didn't want to think about my own life too much. I used to stay up late reading them, getting annoyed when characters didn't communicate properly, or smiling when they finally did.
But I hadn't done that in a long time.
Not since college started feeling overwhelming.
Not since everything in my own life became harder to understand than fiction.
I sat up slowly and reached for my phone.
For a moment, I just stared at it.
Then I opened a reading app I hadn't touched in months.
It loaded slowly.
Too many unread things.
Too many saved stories left halfway.
I hesitated, then clicked on one I remembered vaguely.
A college romance.
Of course.
At first, I almost didn't feel anything.
My mind was still messy.
Still stuck on earlier.
But as I started reading, something shifted slightly.
The more I read, the more I slipped out of my own thoughts and into someone else's.
A girl overthinking everything.
A boy misunderstanding her silence.
A slow, awkward connection forming without either of them fully realizing it.
It was stupid.
Predictable.
But comforting.
I found myself relaxing without noticing.
My grip on my phone loosened.
My breathing slowed.
At one point, I even let out a small laugh under my breath when the female character panicked over something small and completely overthought it.
"…that's literally me," I muttered quietly.
And somehow, saying it made it less heavy.
I kept reading.
Page after page.
Chapter after chapter.
The noise in my head slowly softened.
Not gone.
But quieter.
Like it had moved to the background instead of sitting right in the front.
For the first time that day, Ethan wasn't the only thing I could think about.
And Chloe didn't feel like a comparison anymore.
Just a roommate living her own life.
Just people.
Not measuring sticks.
Not problems.
Just people.
I leaned back against my pillow, still reading, feeling my mood lift slightly without forcing it.
Maybe I had forgotten something simple.
Life didn't always need to be analyzed like a problem.
Sometimes it could just be… experienced.
And for now, that was enough.