Chapter 1– A Life Standing Still

Chapter 1 — A Life Standing Still

There are lives that feel like waiting rooms.

You settle into them. You develop habits. You learn to recognize the sound of the air conditioner, the way the light enters through the window at certain hours, the uncomfortable texture of the seat you eventually fall asleep on anyway. You wait without really knowing what you are waiting for. And little by little, without realizing it, you even stop waiting. You stay. Simply. As if staying had become the only thing you still knew how to do.

Léa’s life felt like that.

She was twenty-two years old and had a three-year relationship behind her — or rather, around her, like something you carry without being able to put down. Karim had been there since the beginning of her adult life. Since the time when she did not yet know who she truly was, when having someone beside her seemed enough to give meaning to the days.

Karim was not a bad person. It was important to say that, even now, even after everything that would follow. He was not violent. He was not cruel. He was simply… elsewhere. Mentally absent despite a constant physical presence. The kind of person who shares your bed for three years and still makes you feel completely alone on certain nights.

Léa had learned to live with that kind of loneliness. She had absorbed it into her routine the way one adapts to chronic pain — you get used to it, you adjust, you continue.

Their days followed a precise rhythm.

In the morning, Karim left early. Léa woke up after him, prepared a coffee she drank standing by the window while looking at the street without truly seeing it. She got dressed, picked up her bag, took the bus. Classes. The library. The ride home. Dinner, often silent. Screens side by side on the couch. Then bed. Then starting again.

Nothing dramatic.

Nothing beautiful either.

Just a life turning endlessly in circles like a clock whose time no one checked anymore.

What people do not understand is that it is not always a catastrophe that breaks a relationship.

Sometimes it is simply wear and tear. Daily life slowly eating everything away. The small things we stop doing — the messages during the day, the questions about how your day went, the looks that last one second too long because you still find each other beautiful.

With Karim, all of that had disappeared so slowly that I never saw the exact moment when it ended. One day, I realized it had been weeks since he had truly looked at me. Not looked at me as if I existed. As if I were a person in his life and not just familiar furniture.

That kind of realization does something to you. Not an explosion. More like a hollow sound. Like knocking on a wall you believed was solid and discovering it is empty inside.

She remembered one evening in particular. A Friday. It was raining heavily outside, and she had cooked — truly cooked, not just reheated something — a dish he used to love. A gesture. An effort toward him. Toward them.

Karim came home late. He ate quickly, eyes on his phone, said it’s good without lifting his head, and sat down in front of the television as if that night were no different from any other — while for her, that night had been an attempt.

She said nothing.

She washed the dishes in silence, turned off her smile like an unnecessary lamp, and went to sit at the other end of the couch.

That night, something decided to stop hoping.

But life continues even when hope disappears.

That may be the strangest thing. You think that without hope, everything would stop. You think the pain would be too visible, too present to keep functioning normally. And yet, the next morning, Léa got up. She drank her coffee. She took her bus.

She went to class.

And it was there, within that mechanical and tasteless routine, that something unexpected slipped in. Not something grand. Not something dazzling. Just an ordinary conversation in a hallway after a sports class, about a basketball game whose results she had not even checked.

A conversation with a boy she barely knew.

She did not yet know — she could not know — that this tiny moment would change the trajectory of everything that followed.

You never know, at the time, which moments truly matter.

You only understand afterward.

That evening, when she returned home, Léa looked at Karim sleeping on the couch, the remote control still in his hand, and a thought came to her that she had not searched for:

Is this really my life?

The question floated in the living room air for a few seconds.

Then she went to bed without answering it.

But the question itself no longer slept.

— End of Chapter 1 —

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