The first morning of college was louder than Yuuichi expected. Voices overlapped in the hallway — laughter, gossip, the clatter of shoes on tile. Everyone seemed to already belong somewhere. He drifted along the edge of it, bag slung over one shoulder, careful not to bump into anyone. Their eyes never lingered on him; they had their own worlds. Self-contained. Selfish, maybe.

He reached the classroom door and paused, catching his reflection in the glass — that unsure look he hated seeing. He let the sigh escape quietly, then stepped in.

The room buzzed with conversation, desks already claimed. Yuuichi took a seat near the window, somewhere between visibility and escape. He unzipped his backpack, the metal teeth rasping louder than he meant. His fingers brushed notebooks, a crumpled receipt, an empty pencil case. No pen. He checked again, slower this time, as if patience could make one appear.

His throat tightened. He glanced sideways at the person beside him — a classmate bent over their phone, unaware.

“Hey… excuse me,” he said, his voice was too thin at first. “I lost my pen. Can I borrow yours?”

The classmate looked up. Yuuichi held the silence, eyes flicking between their face and the table. The hum of the classroom carried on, but he could hear his own pulse, steady and exposed.

The classmate glanced up, eyes flat with surprise. “Oh,” they said, and looked around as if someone else might answer instead. “I... only have one.”

Yuuichi nodded quickly — too quickly. “Ah, no, it’s fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

He looked back at his desk, pretending to search again, just to have something to do. The zipper rasped closed.

Outside, laughter from the hallway floated in, bright and careless. Inside, the air turned still. He folded his hands on the desk and watched sunlight crawl across his notebook — light moving over emptiness.

For a long while, he said nothing. But the silence wrote itself on him, and by the end of class, he’d learned what loneliness sounds like when it hides beneath routine