I MARRIED A MAN WHO CAN’T FEEL LOVE

The lecture hall was full before class even started. It did not feel like any normal classroom. It felt like a waiting room before something bad happened. Voices were talking around me. Chairs were scraping against the floor as students moved around unable to sit. Someone in the back of the room burst out laughing. Quickly stopped and whispered to themselves like they forgot where they were. People were staring at their phones, some recording, some texting, others just staring at nothing. There was a kind of feeling in the room like…the feeling you get before a big storm.I was sitting in the third row. My notebook opened on my lap, my pen resting in my hand. I had written the date at the top of the page. That was it. I could not make myself start writing.Then I heard a girl behind me whisper "He is coming today.""Who?" another voice asked."Dr. Adrian Cole."There was a moment of silence after that. The kind of silence that happens when someone says a name that means something."T

The torchlight was dead.I knew before I opened my eyes. The darkness behind my eyelids was too complete. Too final. The kind that does not lift when morning comes because there is nothing left to lift it.I opened my eyes anyway.The room was grey with early light coming through the small window. My textbook was still across my leg. My neck ached from the angle I had slept in. The eviction notice was folded beside me on the mattress where I had placed it before the dark took everything.I sat up slowly.I looked at the notice.Then I set it face down on the floor and stood up.The water in the bucket was cold the way it was always cold. I did not have fire to heat it up. My body moved fast and quiet the way it did every morning. Just water and soap and the business of getting clean enough to face whatever was outside that door. I looked through the broken piece of mirror. Nothing in it was perfect. Just like everything else. I dried off. Reached for my dress from the nail on the wal

Morning came the way it always did.Without asking.I was already sitting up when the first grey light touched the window. My back against the wall. I had not slept again after four. Just sat there in the dark thinking until the dark became something lighter and the something lighter became day.I got up.The room looked the same. It always looked the same. But something about it felt different this morning. Like I was seeing it from a small distance. The mattress on the floor. The three nails on the wall. The eviction notice face down where it had been for days. The empty gari tin.I looked at all of it for a moment.Then I reached for my dress.I missed my first lecture.I did not know it had happened until I was standing outside the faculty building looking at my phone and the time on the cracked screen told me something I was not ready for.I stood there.First lecture. Gone. Just like that. Without intention. Without a decision. I had left the house and walked and somewhere betwe

The first morning was the hardest. Not because anything went wrong. Because nothing did. And that somehow felt worse. I woke before six. Old habit. My body had not yet understood that it was allowed to rest now. No dying torchlight. No cold bucket waiting. No eviction notice face down on the floor. I lay there staring at the ceiling. Clean white. No water stain. No familiar mark to find in the dark. Just smooth and completely indifferent to the person lying beneath it. I got up anyway. Washed my face. Dressed. Came out into the hallway quietly. The apartment was still. His door at the far end was closed. No sound. I went to the kitchen. Six forty-two. Breakfast was at seven. I was not here for breakfast. I was here because my body had woken me from pure muscle memory and I needed something to do with my hands while the rest of me caught up. I filled the kettle. Set it on the second shelf the way he had said. Leaned against the counter and looked at the kitchen while I waite

I lay back slowly and stared at the clean white ceiling. The apartment was completely quiet. No footsteps. No doors. Nothing moving anywhere. I had broken small rules every day this week. The cup on the left side. The light left on in the kitchen. The chair not pushed in exactly as far as he kept it. He had never looked at me like that for any of those. I closed my eyes. Sleep was already pulling at the edges when my phone buzzed on the desk. I almost left it. It buzzed again. I reached over and tilted the cracked screen toward me. A notification from the university student portal. The kind I had set up months ago to track my research application status. The one I had stopped checking because checking it felt like something I could not afford emotionally. I sat up slowly. Opened it. Read it once. Then again. Flagged. Under investigation. Reason: conflict of interest identified. Reviewer: Dr. A. Cole. The phone sat in my hand. His name. On my application. I read it one