They both returned home after hours of shopping.
The bags were light in Zayan's hands, but they felt unbearably heavy in his chest. Professor Farooq, on the other hand, looked different—lighter, almost glowing. There was a softness in his smile, a quiet excitement he wasn't even trying to hide. In his mind, he could already see it: Zayan in a white coat, standing tall, confident, alive. He imagined Zayan calling him dad one day—not out of obligation, not out of fear, but with warmth, with trust, with a heart that finally felt safe.
That thought filled Professor Farooq with a kind of joy he hadn't felt in years.
Zayan noticed it.
He noticed how hopeful the professor looked, how his eyes carried dreams that weren't yet broken. And somehow, that made Zayan's chest ache even more. Because hope, to him, felt like a lie people told themselves before everything collapsed.
Zayan went up to his room quietly.
From the outside, he looked fine. Calm. Obedient. Almost normal. But inside, something felt wrong—off-balance, like a bone that had healed incorrectly. He thought he was happy. Or at least, he told himself that he was. After all, he wasn't starving. He wasn't being shouted at. No one was abandoning him in words anymore.
So why did the emptiness remain?
He sat on the edge of his bed, staring at nothing, and slowly realized something terrifying:
He didn't feel loneliness the way he used to.
Before, loneliness burned. It screamed. It begged to be noticed.
Now it was quiet. Settled. Permanent.
He thought back to the days when he smoked and drank—when he tried to poison the pain out of himself. Back then, he believed those habits were destroying him. But now, sitting in a clean room with fresh clothes and books waiting downstairs, he realized the truth.
Those things hadn't broken him.
They had only revealed what was already shattered.
For a moment—a small, dangerous moment—he wondered if maybe he could be the person he once was. The boy who waited. The boy who hoped. The boy who believed people came back.
But the thought died as quickly as it was born.
Maybe, he told himself.
And then he shook his head.
Maybe was the most cruel word he knew.
So he made a decision, quietly, without ceremony. He decided not to hope anymore. Not fully. Not honestly. He would live moment to moment, breath to breath. No future. No expectations. Just survival.
Yet even as he made that decision, something else gnawed at him.
The thing that bothered him the most wasn't the memories.
It wasn't his parents.
It wasn't even the past.
It was Professor Farooq.
Zayan was seventeen. Too young. Too fragile. Too unfinished to be standing at the edge of a life that demanded so much from him. College. Responsibility. Becoming something when he barely felt like a person at all.
Professor Farooq believed he could do it.
That belief irritated Zayan more than anything else.
Because belief meant expectation.
And expectation always came before disappointment.
He looked at himself in the mirror and barely recognized the reflection staring back. He didn't feel like himself anymore—if he ever truly had been. The anger, the numbness, the exhaustion, the guilt… they had blended into something unfamiliar.
And the realization hit him slowly, painfully:
He hated himself.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
But quietly, deeply, in the way that never really goes away.
He lay down, staring at the ceiling, listening to the silence of a house that felt safer than any place he'd ever known—and yet still didn't feel like home.
Because safety didn't erase damage.
And kindness didn't undo abandonment.
And somewhere deep inside Zayan, a broken part of him whispered a truth he was too tired to fight anymore:
Even if this life stays…
He might never fully arrive in it.