Distance

The next morning, Saiful woke with decision already sitting in his chest.

Not clearly.

Not nobly.

Only there.

Like something heavy that had settled overnight into the shape of a necessary wrong.

He lay for a moment in the dim light before dawn, staring at the ceiling fan as it turned slowly overhead, and tried to name the feeling properly. It was not peace. Certainly not conviction in the clean sense. There was no satisfying moral clarity waiting for him in the morning, no bright line drawn by God across the floor of his room telling him which choice would hurt less and therefore count as mercy.

There was only the same truth he had gone to sleep with.

This had become real.

And if it had become real, he could no longer let it continue in a shape that asked Xinyue to keep absorbing uncertainty while he took refuge inside his own care and called it thoughtfulness.

He sat up slowly, elbows on his knees, and looked at the dark outline of his desk by the window. His phone lay there silent. For once, there was no message from her waiting to shift the emotional weather before sunrise.

That silence, too, seemed to belong to what had already changed.

In the kitchen, the flat still held its early-morning softness. His mother was awake before everyone else as usual, moving through the small familiar choreography of breakfast preparation with the quiet economy of someone who had done love in service for so many years it no longer needed announcing. Toast warmed on the pan. Tea steeped. The smell of fried egg and onions sat gently in the air.

She looked up when he entered.

“You’re early.”

“I woke up.”

“That is generally how mornings work.”

Saiful almost smiled.

His mother set a plate on the table and watched him sit. “You look tired.”

“Semester.”

It was the answer he gave most often because it was usually true enough to pass under further inspection.

This time, however, she did not move away immediately. She stood with one hand resting lightly on the back of the chair opposite him and regarded him with that quiet maternal attention that made lying feel both easy and faintly shameful.

“Hmm,” she said.

Only that.

But the sound held a world of unspoken things.

He broke his toast in half and asked, to turn her away from whatever she might already suspect, “Where’s Aisyah?”

“Still asleep. She studied late.”

His mother poured tea into his cup. “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Use your sister as a distraction.”

He looked up.

Her mouth softened very slightly at one corner. “I raised you, Saiful. Eat.”

That was all.

No interrogation. No dramatic parental intuition turned into conversation. Just the small, unnerving reminder that people who loved him closely could tell when his composure had become more deliberate than natural.

He ate in silence after that, but the awareness followed him all the way to campus.

The morning light was hard already, the sky washed pale with heat before nine. Students moved across the walkways in increasingly practiced streams–first-years no longer lost enough to be charming about it, seniors too tired to walk quickly unless absolutely necessary. The university had reached that stage in the semester where everyone looked faintly occupied even while standing still.

Saiful went first to the library, then to his ten o’clock lecture, then to a project consultation that ran twelve minutes over and left him with exactly enough time to consider, again, whether distance was truly mercy or simply fear wearing respectable clothes.

He did not arrive at a better answer.

By one in the afternoon, the heat had become almost vindictive. The canteen fans were losing their moral authority. Students sat over lunch with the exhausted concentration of people trying to extract calories and social function from the same forty minutes. Saiful took his tray to a table at the edge, half screened by a pillar, intending to eat quickly and review notes before the next tutorial.

He had almost finished half his rice when a shadow fell over the table.

He looked up.

Xinyue stood there with her bag slung over one shoulder and a can of iced tea in one hand. Mei Qi was beside her, expression already suspicious in the way of close friends who sensed tension before they knew its full architecture.

“Senior,” Xinyue said.

The word still changed shape every time she said it.

Today it landed softly. Careful. As if she too was feeling for where the ground had shifted overnight.

“There’s space here,” Mei Qi said, glancing at the empty chairs with practical bluntness.

There was.

Saiful looked at the chairs.

Then at his tray.

Then back at Xinyue, whose face was composed enough that only someone who had studied her properly would have noticed the slight tightness around her eyes.

He should have said yes.

The kindness in him rose first. Immediate. Automatic.

Then the decision followed close behind it like a hand on the shoulder.

He heard himself say, “I’m meeting my group in a bit.”

It was not a lie.

He did have a group meeting later.

Not in the canteen.

Not soon enough to make the table unavailable now.

Xinyue knew this at once. He saw it in the almost imperceptible pause before she smiled.

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

Mei Qi looked from one face to the other with the sharp wariness of a person who had just heard something technically acceptable and emotionally wrong.

“We’ll find another table,” she said.

Xinyue nodded once. “See you later, Senior.”

He inclined his head because speech, in that second, would only have made the lie uglier.

They walked away.

Not dramatically. Just two girls moving back into the canteen crowd, one practical and one trying too hard to make nothing visible from behind.

Saiful sat with his hand still around the spoon long after they were gone.

The rice had cooled.

A burst of laughter rose from some table near the drink stall and faded under the fan noise.

Across from him, the empty chair remained offensively available.

He had done what he decided to do.

And it felt, immediately, like cowardice.

Haziq found him ten minutes later, tray in hand, and stopped at the sight of the empty chairs. “You look like a man who has committed administrative sin.”

Saiful didn’t look up. “Sit.”

That alone told Haziq enough. He put the tray down slowly and lowered himself into the chair opposite with unusual caution.

“What happened?”

Saiful swallowed water first, as if that might make the answer less difficult to say. “Nothing.”

“Wrong. Try again.”

He stared at the condensation on his bottle. “She came by.”

“And?”

“I told her I was meeting the group.”

Haziq looked around the table once, then back at him. “Are you currently meeting the group?”

“No.”

“My brother.” Haziq leaned back with a look of pained disbelief. “Why would you do that?”

Saiful’s jaw tightened. “Because this can’t keep going like this.”

“That does not answer my question.”

“It does if you listen properly.”

Haziq’s face lost some of its usual mischief. “You’re trying to pull away.”

“Yes.”

“By lying badly over lunch?”

“I didn’t lie badly.”

Haziq gestured toward the empty chairs. “The evidence disagrees.”

Saiful rubbed one hand over his mouth. Fatigue pressed behind his eyes in that dull, steady way that made every moral problem feel less philosophical and more bodily. “I can’t let her keep building a future out of half-answers.”

The canteen noise carried around them, ordinary and indifferent. Plates clattered into the tray return. Someone cursed softly over a spilled drink. A group of freshmen at the far table argued over whether a professor’s email wording had been passive-aggressive or merely Singaporean.

Haziq watched Saiful for a long moment.

Then said, very quietly, “And you think this is kinder?”

Saiful did not answer.

Because he did not know.

Because kindness had become, lately, the least straightforward word in the language.

The rest of the day did not improve.

Xinyue was in the afternoon tutorial. Same room. Same rows of old tables with their carved initials and faded scratches. Same overhead fans that supplemented the air-conditioning just enough to make the room feel always one degree too cold or too warm, never correct.

She sat two rows behind him with Mei Qi instead of drifting forward to the side seat that had become, over weeks, informally hers when there was space and no one wanted to say so.

She did not message him the lecturer’s inevitable first-week-midterm joke as she ordinarily would have.

When class ended, she left with the others before he had packed his laptop away.

These were small things.

That was what made them brutal.

The absence of her reaching toward him, once he had stepped aside from it, revealed just how much of his day had learned to expect it.

At asr, while washing for prayer in the faculty ablution area, Saiful found himself thinking with a kind of exhausted contempt that perhaps he had been relying on her constancy more than he had permitted himself to admit.

That thought stayed with him through the prayer.

It stayed with him when he checked his phone afterward and found no message from her.

It stayed with him into the evening, when a group project ran long and one of his teammates made a joke he did not hear because he had, against his own discipline, just looked up from the spreadsheet at exactly the moment a message notification lit his screen.

It was from Aisyah.

He locked the phone and hated himself a little for the involuntary drop in his chest.

At seven-thirty, rain came hard and sudden, slanting against the building windows and trapping half the faculty inside. Students gathered under the sheltered linkways waiting for the weather to decide what kind of mood it was in. Saiful left his project group anyway because he needed air more than dryness.

Under the covered walkway near the old wing, he found Mei Qi alone by the vending machine, tapping her phone with the expression of someone trying not to become furious at an app.

She looked up when he approached.

Her face changed instantly into something more guarded.

That was new.

It told him two things at once: first, that she knew enough to take sides temporarily, and second, that whatever Xinyue had shown of the canteen moment had been more than nothing.

“Senior,” she said.

He stopped at a respectful distance. Rain hissed beyond the edge of the shelter, bright under the overhead lights.

“Have you seen Xinyue?” he asked.

Mei Qi held his gaze for a second, long enough that the question itself began to feel like evidence.

“She went back to hall.”

“Early?”

“She had a headache.”

The sentence was ordinary.

But Mei Qi’s tone made it impossible not to hear the implied continuation.

And possibly a heartache, senior, but since we are all pretending to be mature about things, let’s not force me to say it.

Saiful nodded once. “Okay.”

He should have left then.

Instead he heard himself ask, “Was it because of lunch?”

Mei Qi looked almost startled by the directness.

Then her expression flattened into the kind of honesty only close friends and tired people usually dared.

“She knows when you’re being cold on purpose,” she said.

The rain seemed louder after that.

Saiful kept his face still with effort. “I wasn’t trying to be cruel.”

“No,” Mei Qi said. “I figured that out. Which makes it worse, actually.”

He looked at her.

She pushed her phone into her bag and crossed her arms, not defensive, just unwilling to let him leave with a cleaner version of the situation than the truth allowed.

“She spends a lot of time trying to give you dignity,” Mei Qi said. “Maybe give some back.”

The line hit harder than he expected.

Because it was fair.

Because Xinyue had spent weeks doing exactly that–receiving his slowness without mocking it, treating his care as care even when he wrapped it in practicality, respecting lines he had not always named aloud, speaking honestly without demanding identical speed in return.

And he had repaid that by lying over lunch to make distance look like scheduling.

Mei Qi’s mouth softened slightly when she saw the answer land. “I’m not saying this because I think she’s fragile,” she added. “She’s not. But she’s very tired lately. And when people are tired, they feel the shape of things more.”

Before he could answer, her bus notification apparently arrived. She glanced at the screen, then back at him. “Good night, Senior.”

And because she was, at heart, kinder than her sharpness first suggested, she added on her way past, “If you’re going to hurt her, at least don’t do it lazily.”

Then she was gone into the rain-shadowed walkway, leaving him alone with the vending machine glow and the unpleasant accuracy of that sentence.

He walked home from the station instead of taking the feeder bus.

The rain had eased by then into a fine mist that clung to the roads and railings and leaves. HDB corridors shone damp under the lights. The city after rain always seemed briefly better behaved, cooled into a softer version of itself. Even the traffic sounded less harsh from inside it.

By the time he reached the block, his shoes were wet at the edges and his thoughts had achieved no greater moral order than when he left campus.

At home, Aisyah was at the dining table eating cut fruit from a bowl and pretending not to wait for him.

She looked up the moment he entered.

“Oh no,” she said.

Saiful set his bag down. “What?”

“You have the face.”

“There are too many versions of this sentence in our house.”

“This one is specific.” Aisyah pointed her fork at him. “This is the face you get when you’ve done something technically defensible and emotionally stupid.”

He stared at her.

She sat back with the satisfaction of a woman who had received all needed confirmation. “Ya Allah. You did.”

“Please stop treating my life like a series.”

“It is a series. I’m just the audience.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. Fatigue and shame made the gesture feel older than his years. “I’m going to shower.”

Aisyah’s voice softened unexpectedly. “Abang.”

He paused.

She put her fork down. “Do you think pushing someone away hurts them less just because you do it quietly?”

He did not answer.

Aisyah watched him with none of her usual mischief now. “Sometimes quiet hurts more,” she said. “Because the other person has to do all the explaining themselves.”

Then she looked back down at her fruit as if she had not just said the one thing he had been most afraid of hearing in his own house.

He went to his room after the shower and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time with the towel still around his shoulders before reaching for his phone.

There was still no message from Xinyue.

That silence felt deserved.

He opened their chat anyway and stared at the last exchange from the night before.

This isn’t just a freshman crush anymore.

I know. Good night, Xinyue.

At the time he had believed the line honest and sufficient.

Now it looked thin.

Worse than thin.

Cowardly in its caution.

He locked the screen, set the phone down, picked it up again.

Then he wrote:

Are you okay?

He stared at the message before sending it.

The question felt too small for all the shapes beneath it.

He sent it anyway.

The reply did not come.

Not in five minutes. Not in ten.

By the time it finally did, he had already understood that waiting had become its own punishment.

I’m okay. Just tired.

A second line followed.

Don’t worry, Senior. I can take a hint.

The words emptied his chest.

He read them once.

Then again.

The danger of Xinyue had always been that she rarely weaponized truth. She simply placed it down and let it remain itself. This line, however, had edges. Not cruel ones. Edges shaped by hurt trying very hard not to become accusation.

He typed and deleted twice before answering.

That isn’t what I meant.

Her reply came more quickly than before.

Then what did you mean?

The same question.

Always the same question.

And always the one he was least prepared to answer cleanly.

He stared at the screen until the typing cursor seemed accusatory in its small, blinking patience.

What did he mean?

That he was trying to stop this before it outgrew his courage.

That he was afraid of building hope where intention had not yet fully formed into a future he could stand before God and family and his own conscience and call honorable.

That the more he wanted her, the more dangerous it felt to let wanting look like permission before he knew he could carry it properly.

That he had begun choosing distance not because he felt less, but because he felt too much and did not trust himself not to let care become selfish if left unexamined.

He could not send any of that in a message.

Not like this.

So he wrote the nearest truth he could fit into plain words.

I meant I’m trying to be careful.

Her answer took a long time.

When it arrived, it was only one line.

Sometimes careful feels exactly like rejection from the other side.

He closed his eyes.

The room was very quiet. Outside the window, one of the neighboring flats had its television on too loud. Somewhere in the corridor, a gate clicked shut. Aisyah laughed faintly at something in the living room and then lowered her voice at once when their mother must have shushed her.

All of it sounded impossibly normal.

Saiful read Xinyue’s line again.

Then again.

He knew she was right.

That was the part that made the choice unbearable.

Because if careful felt like rejection from where she stood, then whatever distance he created in the name of protecting her might already be doing its damage before any clearer explanation could redeem it.

He typed:

I know. I’m sorry.

This time there was no reply.

Not that night.

He set the phone down and leaned back against the wall, one hand over his eyes.

The ceiling fan hummed. The air in the room was cool from the shower but not enough to erase the heat still carried in from the day. Fatigue sat everywhere–in his shoulders, behind his eyes, in the bones of his wrists and knees. But beneath it, more difficult and more exhausting, was the new certainty that had been forming since the bench conversation and had now become impossible to dismiss.

Distance was not neutral.

It did not hover cleanly in moral air waiting to be interpreted as wisdom.

It entered the other person’s body as feeling.

As confusion.

As silence they had to explain to themselves because you refused, for their sake or yours, to turn inward conflict into plain language.

He had always believed harm came most obviously through recklessness.

Say too much. Promise too soon. Touch what you had not earned. Let need masquerade as love. Let loneliness use another person as remedy and call the whole thing fate.

All true.

But there was another kind of harm too.

The kind built from withholding.

From making someone brave enough to be honest and then answering that honesty with a coldness they had to decode alone.

By midnight he was still awake.

He tried reading. Failed.

Tried organizing next week’s schedule. Managed only half.

Tried prayer again in the quiet of his room, not formal, just a few plain lines under his breath asking for guidance and finding instead only the same unsoftened truth rising back toward him.

You cannot protect her by disappearing in pieces.

The thought felt less like revelation and more like accusation.

Near one in the morning, his phone lit once more.

He reached for it too quickly.

Xinyue.

I’m sorry. That last message sounded harsher than I meant.

A second line appeared.

I’m just very tired, and I think tiredness makes me honest in ugly ways.

He stared at it with sudden grief so sharp it almost felt like tenderness turned inside out.

Even now she was trying to soften the edge for him.

Trying to preserve his dignity after he had spent the day giving her so little of the same.

He typed before caution could interfere.

No. You were honest. Not ugly.

Then, because there was no way around it now:

I’m the one who was unfair today.

He watched the typing indicator appear and vanish, appear and vanish again.

Finally:

Okay.

Then:

Can we just sleep tonight?

He read the line and felt, all at once, how exhausted she must be.

Not just by coursework or family or fasting hours observed from nearby rather than within.

By him.

By the effort of staying open toward a man who had answered her fear with distance and then called it care.

Yes, he wrote. Sleep.

She left the message on read.

This time he did not blame her.

He switched off the lamp and lay down in darkness that felt denser than usual. The fan turned overhead. His sheets still smelled faintly of detergent and damp air. In the flat beyond his door, everything had gone quiet.

And in that quiet, finally stripped of the day’s interruptions, he understood the chapter for what it was.

Not a successful retreat.

Not evidence of maturity.

Only the first proof that if he let fear dictate the shape of his carefulness, he would not save her from pain.

He would simply relocate it into subtler rooms.

The most dangerous part of all was that he still did not know what the better answer was.

Only that this one had failed.

And somewhere inside the ache of that failure, another truth was beginning to form–slower, quieter, but harder to resist with each hour.

He missed her already.

Not abstractly.

Not in the sentimental way men imagined themselves aching when really they only missed attention.

He missed the actual shape of her in his days.

The messages.

The look she gave him when he said something unintentionally funny.

The way she remembered his boundaries better than he remembered his own peace.

The fact that she kept choosing him without asking him to become simpler than he was.

He missed her in a way that made distance feel less like virtue and more like self-harm distributed outward.

That was the thought that kept him awake longest.

And when sleep finally came, it came thinly, broken by the unease of a man who had tried to do the right thing and discovered, with humiliating speed, that good intentions did not automatically make hurt less real.

By morning, he knew only one thing with certainty.

He could not continue this way.

The next time he spoke to her, it would have to be honestly.

Not as a senior.

Not as a coward.

As himself.

And that, perhaps, was the most frightening distance left to cross.