I learned very quickly that Switzerland doesn't punish you for breaking rules.
It simply removes the need to break them at all.
Everything here is designed to make resistance feel unnecessary. The schedules are immaculate. The views are breathtaking in a way that feels instructional, like beauty with expectations attached. Even the language is curated—opportunity, discipline, focus—layered over restriction until compliance begins to feel like gratitude.
Even the mountains feel complicit.
They rise in disciplined rows, sharp and breathtaking and unmoving, as if to say: This is what permanence looks like. Adapt.
I stopped counting the days somewhere around the third week.
Not because I'd adjusted.
Because counting meant hoping, and hope had become too loud to survive here.
Every morning followed the same choreography. Bells. Cold air that bit just enough to keep you alert. Corridors so clean they reflected you back whether you wanted to be seen or not. Faces trained into polite neutrality, expressions perfected to suggest ambition without hunger.
The academy didn't ask who I was before I arrived.
It didn't care what I'd been pulled away from.
It only cared that I fit.
And I did.
That was the problem.
I fit too well.
I attended every class. Took precise notes. Answered when called on, never too eagerly, never too slowly. I smiled when expected. I let the counselors believe progress looked like silence, that stability sounded like compliance.
They mistook containment for healing.
But silence has weight.
And every day, it settled heavier in my chest, pressing inward until breathing felt like a choice.
I didn't tell anyone about Aras.
Not my roommates, who spoke about futures like they were guaranteed. Not my advisor, who used the word resilience like it was a finish line. Not the girl who walked with me to breakfast and asked, genuinely, if I thought we were lucky to be here.
Lucky wasn't the word.
Aras had been erased from my life so thoroughly it felt intentional.
No calls.
No messages.
No accidental overlaps.
Not even the small, humiliating coincidences people cling to when they're hoping not to be forgotten.
It was as if someone had gone through my world with deliberate care and removed him without disturbing anything else.
That kind of absence doesn't happen by accident.
It happens by design.
I told myself he was protecting me.
That was what he'd said the last time I saw him—voice low, eyes too steady, already finished with the conversation before I'd been allowed into it.
I'm doing this for you.
I hated how easily I'd believed him.
The narrator would probably tell you this was where I should have gotten angry.
But anger takes energy.
And exile teaches you conservation.
So instead, I observed.
I learned the rules. The exits. The blind spots. I noticed which staff members looked away first and which ones remembered names. I learned which doors were symbolic and which ones actually locked.
I had been raised by a father who called this awareness.
I called it survival.
At night, when the academy finally dimmed and even ambition went quiet, I lay awake staring at the ceiling and thought about the last time Aras touched my hand.
Not dramatically. Not a confession or a promise.
Just his fingers brushing mine as he passed me a glass, like it meant something he didn't trust himself to say aloud.
That was how he loved.
Carefully.
Silently.
As if restraint itself were devotion.
I wondered if he missed me.
Then I wondered if that even mattered.
The first message came on a morning when fog swallowed the valley whole and the mountains disappeared entirely.
I was standing by the common-room window, coffee cooling untouched in my hands, when my phone vibrated.
Unknown number.
My body reacted before my mind did. Pulse spiking. Fingers tightening. Breath catching like I'd been called by name in a language I hadn't spoken in months.
I didn't open it right away.
I told myself that mattered.
When I finally did, the message was brief.
You still hate me?
I stared at the screen until the words blurred.
Hate wasn't the right word.
Hate required proximity.
Naiya: You don't get to ask that.
The reply came almost instantly.
Then what do I get?
I exhaled sharply through my nose.
Naiya: Distance. Like you wanted.
The silence that followed stretched long enough for the coffee to go cold.
I should have stopped there.
I didn't.
We didn't talk every day after that.
That would have been too honest.
Instead, we existed in something worse—intermittent truth.
A message here. A half-answer there. Never enough to resolve anything. Always enough to reopen it.
He never apologized.
Not directly.
But everything he said carried the unmistakable weight of restraint.
I didn't want to leave.
You don't know what I'm protecting you from.
This isn't about not wanting you.
Every sentence stopped just short of the truth.
Every pause felt intentional.
It made me furious.
It made me miss him more.
The day I realized he was back in Europe was the day something hardened inside me.
He didn't tell me.
I knew because absence changes shape.
The silence felt different—closer, sharper, like we were no longer separated by oceans, just decisions.
When I confronted him, his response came hours later.
France.
That was all.
Not I'm here.
Not I came back for you.
Just a location.
As if geography could stand in for accountability.
France changed him.
I could hear it in the tightening of his words, in the way explanations vanished entirely. He spoke like someone who had returned to a place where power listened again.
That scared me.
Because when Aras felt powerful, he felt dangerous.
And when he felt dangerous, he hid behind control.
I didn't know about Nalie then.
Not yet.
I only knew something had shifted.
That he was slipping into a version of himself I recognized too well—polished, distant, protected by status instead of honesty.
And I knew what that meant.
He was building armor.
Which meant he expected a war.
The narrator would later say this was the moment the story stopped being about separation.
This was the moment it became about collision.
Because when two people refuse to speak plainly long enough, the truth doesn't disappear.
It waits.
And when it returns, it doesn't ask permission.