hate is a very strong word

I hate Leeron.

I hate how he always looks so carefree.

I hate how he always looks confused whenever I glare at him.

I hate how he keeps asking if he did something wrong.

I hate how he looks at me with such a smile that it's irritating.

I hate that I have to see him everyday. No matter how many times I tell myself to stop looking, my eyes always find him anyway. It's annoying. It's exhausting. I wish I could just ignore him like everyone else does. But somehow, the more I try, the more impossible it becomes.

Why does everything feel so different now?

The campus looks exactly the same, the clock on the lecture hall wall ticks the exact same way, and the people around us are just laughing like nothing happened. But everything is completely off. There's this weird, unsettling silence between us that nobody else notices. It's like we're trapped in a completely different version of reality, one where he looks right through me, and it makes my skin crawl.

It feels wrong... dark, and dangerous, like a quiet warning that everything we had is completely slipping away into nothing.

It makes me question my own mind every time I walk through the university gates. The world outside keeps moving, professors keep writing on the board, and students keep gossiping in the quad, but for me, time has completely jammed. There is an underlying tension in the air that nobody else can feel, a heavy, ominous weight that feels like a trap waiting to spring. Every corridor feels slightly longer, every shadow looks slightly deeper, and it all centers around him. He stands there in the middle of the crowded lecture hall, completely untouched by the darkness that is slowly swallowing me whole.

I look at his hands, his bag, the way he leans against the brick pillars outside, and it feels like looking at a ghost that doesn't know it's dead. Nothing makes sense anymore. The reality I knew has been completely overwritten by this cold, unrecognizable present, and I am the only one left with the truth. I am stuck watching the pieces of our past dissolve into absolute nothingness while he just smiles, entirely oblivious to the fact that something is really wrong with the universe we are standing in.

Sometimes he catches me staring at him.

Then he gives me that confused look.

I want to slap him.

And I hate how he acts like everything is normal. And every day, I hate him a little more.

Not long ago, he asked me why I hated him.

I wanted to answer.

But I couldn't.

So I stared at him and walked away.

There are words sitting in my throat that refuse to come out. Every answer I could give would mess everything up in the wrong way. I can't tell him, not ever. Every explanation sounds impossible and too much for me to bare. So I stay silent, hoping he'll stop asking before I completely fall apart.

If I speak the words aloud, I feel like the whole fragile illusion will shatter, leaving us both exposed to whatever darkness caused this mess in the first place. So I choose the silence, even when it tears at my insides, even when the pressure in my chest becomes almost too much to handle. I force myself to turn my back on him, walking away down the empty building corridors with my teeth gritted, keeping the secrets locked deep inside where they can't hurt anyone else.

Sometimes I wonder if it'd be easier if I hated him for real.

Maybe then my chest wouldn't hurt every time I looked at him.

Maybe then I wouldn't keep watching him from across the classroom.

Maybe then I wouldn't care.

But I do.

That's why I hate him.

I hate him because he was mine first.

And now, I'm becoming a stranger to him.

Because since then...

He had forgotten about me.

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