Michael learned very quickly that people relaxed when you behaved exactly as expected.
It wasn't about pretending. Pretending required effort, and effort left seams — tiny inconsistencies that invited inspection. People noticed when answers were too fast, or too slow, when emotion lagged behind expression. What worked better was alignment. Letting his responses settle neatly into the shape of the questions asked.
"How are you feeling today?"
Stable.
"And your thoughts?"
Clear.
"Any urges to contact her?"
No.
All true.
Just not in the way they thought.
He felt stable because nothing inside him was competing anymore. No confusion, no internal argument. Clarity had replaced the static. As for urges — urges implied impulse, restlessness, desire without direction. He didn't have that. What he had was understanding.
The room he stayed in now was smaller than his old dorm, but quieter. The walls were bare except for a noticeboard with laminated schedules and a printed list of coping techniques he could recite from memory. Breathing exercises. Grounding prompts. Emergency contacts. He followed the routine because routine was useful.
Wake. Shower. Breakfast. Medication.
Group session. Individual session. Free time.
Lights out.
Time stacked itself neatly here, one unit on top of another, clean and symmetrical.
Michael liked that.
It gave him space to think — uninterrupted by urgency, unclouded by emotion. The staff mistook his compliance for progress. The other patients mistook his silence for introspection. No one pressed him, because nothing about him demanded to be pressed.
People misunderstood obsession.
They thought it was noise — frantic, messy, emotional. They imagined shaking hands, raised voices, irrational actions carried out in desperation. They confused fixation with instability, intensity with lack of control.
That was infatuation.
Obsession — real obsession — was clean.
It was precision.
It was restraint.
It was knowing exactly where something belonged and refusing to place it anywhere else.
Michael sat by the window in the common room, hands resting loosely on his knees, watching a bird hop along the railing outside. The movement was repetitive, purposeful. Hop. Pause. Hop again. The bird didn't appear agitated. It wasn't searching frantically or trying to escape.
It was waiting.
The thought settled comfortably in his mind.
He understood that now.
He didn't need to look for Hidayah. He didn't need to reach for her or leave traces of himself in her life. The mistake he'd made before — the only mistake — was urgency. Wanting proof too quickly. Wanting validation instead of certainty.
Certainty didn't announce itself.
It didn't demand acknowledgement or reassurance. It didn't need to be spoken aloud to exist. Certainty endured — quietly, patiently — until circumstances aligned enough for recognition to occur.
Michael watched the bird take flight at last, wings cutting smoothly through the air, unhurried.
It hadn't left because it was afraid.
It had left because the moment was right.
He smiled to himself, small and contained, and returned to his schedule when the bell rang — another marker of time falling perfectly into place.
There was nothing to rush.
Things that were unfinished always had a way of completing themselves.
And Michael was very good at waiting.
—————
Dr. Lim asked the same questions every week, rearranged just enough to sound new.
Michael noticed the pattern early on. The phrasing shifted, the emphasis moved, but the intent remained consistent — a gentle probe around the same fixed points. Mood. Thought process. Insight. Risk.
He answered them patiently.
Patience, he'd learned, was disarming. People expected defensiveness, agitation, resistance. When none of that appeared, they relaxed. They filled the silence themselves.
He had learned which words opened doors and which ones closed them.
Delusion closed doors.
Certainty was dangerous. Conviction even more so. Words that implied permanence, inevitability, design — those were noted carefully, circled, returned to later.
Stress opened doors.
Stress suggested pressure, not pathology. Something external. Something that could be managed.
Trauma was a master key.
Trauma reframed everything. It softened sharp edges, explained intensity, justified fixation. Trauma allowed them to see patterns without asking whether those patterns were true.
"I've been reflecting," Michael said calmly during one session, hands folded loosely in his lap. He kept his tone even, thoughtful — the way people spoke when they wanted to be understood, not defended. "About why I reacted the way I did."
Dr. Lim looked up from her notes, attentive. "And?"
"I was afraid of losing something important," he said. He let a brief pause sit there, not too long. Just enough to feel considered. "Fear makes people behave badly."
She nodded, immediately. "That's insightful."
Michael smiled faintly.
Fear hadn't driven him.
Fear was loud. Fear panicked. Fear lashed out blindly. What he'd felt hadn't been fear at all — it had been impatience. The irritation of watching something drift out of alignment. The discomfort of knowing a sequence was unfolding incorrectly.
But impatience sounded petulant. Selfish. Unacceptable.
Fear, on the other hand, was respectable.
They wanted brokenness they could fix. They wanted a narrative with an endpoint — recovery, progress, resolution. A story that moved forward in a straight line and concluded neatly.
Michael gave them all of it.
He spoke about grounding, about learning to stay present. He described breathing exercises he already performed perfectly. He talked about acceptance, about understanding that some things couldn't be controlled.
About letting go.
They liked that phrase. It appeared in their notes. It reappeared in later sessions, reflected back to him as evidence of growth.
So he said it often.
"I'm learning to let go," he told them, voice steady. "To release what I can't change."
He meant it, in his own way.
He had let go of urgency. Let go of interference. Let go of the need to be seen or acknowledged. Those things only disrupted the process.
Letting go didn't mean abandoning something.
It meant trusting its return.
Dr. Lim watched him carefully now — not suspicious, exactly, but attentive. He met her gaze without flinching, without intensity. He offered no resistance, no excess.
Nothing about him demanded containment.
When the session ended, she reminded him of his coping strategies. He thanked her. He returned to the common room. He followed the schedule.
Compliance was not submission.
It was camouflage.
Michael sat quietly among the others, observing the rhythms of the place — the way people paced when they were anxious, the way staff hovered when they sensed volatility. None of it applied to him.
He was calm.
He was cooperative.
He was improving.
And beneath it all, untouched and perfectly intact, his certainty remained — patient, ordered, and waiting for the moment when recognition would no longer be avoidable.
After all, people always mistook silence for absence.
Michael knew better.
—————
At night, when the lights dimmed and the corridors settled into their artificial quiet, Michael lay awake and sorted his memories.
Not to relive them.
Reliving implied indulgence. Sentiment. Emotional looping. He had no interest in that. What he did instead was catalogue them — placing each recollection where it belonged, separating signal from distortion.
Memory was architecture. If you understood its structure, you could move through it without getting lost.
He pictured it the way he might picture a building: load-bearing beams, transitional spaces, rooms that connected without needing doors. Some memories were central, essential to the design. Others were decorative, easily removed without affecting the integrity of the whole.
He discarded the unnecessary ones first.
Faces were unreliable. Expressions changed with mood, with lighting, with time. Voices blurred, especially when remembered too often. Words were the weakest material of all — too easily reshaped by interpretation.
What remained was more accurate.
He remembered the way her presence felt.
Not her face. Not her voice. But the shape of her in a room. The way space seemed to register her arrival before he consciously did, like a shift in pressure. How the air rearranged itself subtly, as if accommodating something that mattered.
Silence behaved differently around her.
It didn't collapse or retreat. It adjusted — stretched, softened, made room. Michael remembered noticing that even before he understood what it meant. A sense of alignment, of things settling correctly when she was nearby.
That kind of knowing didn't disappear.
It wasn't dependent on proximity or reinforcement. It didn't fade just because time passed or circumstances changed. It waited — intact, untouched by absence.
Michael no longer replayed moments.
Repetition degraded meaning. Each replay introduced noise, emotional residue that distorted the original clarity. Nostalgia, he'd learned, weakened resolve. It tempted people to mistake feeling for truth.
He had moved past that.
Instead, he focused on continuity.
Past.
Present.
Future.
They weren't separate things, no matter how insistently people pretended they were. Separation was a convenience — a way to create the illusion of endings. In reality, time behaved more like layers of glass stacked closely together. Distinct, but transparent. Always influencing what lay beneath and above.
He existed comfortably in all three.
The past informed the present. The present prepared the future. None of it contradicted the others. There was no rupture, no loss — only temporary misalignment.
And Hidayah was threaded through all of it.
Not as an obsession, despite what others would call it. Not as a fixation anchored to one point in time. She was structural. Integral. Remove her, and the design failed to make sense.
Michael lay still, hands resting on his abdomen, breathing slow and even. Around him, the facility slept — staff doing rounds, doors closed, systems humming quietly to themselves.
Containment was an illusion.
You could restrict movement. You could manage behaviour. You could dim lights and enforce routines. But you couldn't alter architecture once it was sound.
Eventually, alignment always reasserted itself.
Michael closed his eyes, satisfied.
There was nothing to act on. Nothing to pursue. Nothing to correct yet.
The structure held.
And he was very good at waiting inside it.
—————
The staff believed improvement looked like absence.
Absence of fixation. Absence of agitation. Absence of reaction. They watched for what wasn't there — raised voices, clenched fists, emotional volatility — and mistook quiet for resolution.
Michael was very good at absence.
He attended group therapy and took his seat without hesitation, posture open, expression neutral. He listened while others talked about anger, confusion, regret. He nodded in the right places. He mirrored concern without absorbing it. When it was his turn, he spoke just enough to register participation.
Shared carefully neutral experiences.
"I'm learning to manage intrusive thoughts," he said once, tone measured, neither proud nor distressed.
The group facilitator smiled. "That's excellent progress."
Michael returned the smile, appropriate in size and duration.
Later, in his room, he wrote the phrase down in his notebook, under a heading he'd labelled Effective Language. He recorded which responses elicited approval, which ones prompted follow-up questions, which ones ended discussions cleanly.
He wasn't lying.
The thoughts weren't intrusive anymore. They didn't interrupt or overwhelm. They arrived when invited and remained contained when not.
They were no longer noise.
They were organised.
And organisation, Michael understood, was often mistaken for healing.
——————
There were evaluations.
Reviews.
Conversations conducted behind closed doors, in rooms whose thresholds he learned never to approach.
Michael did not resent the exclusion. Being unseen was an advantage. Observation invited correction; distance allowed refinement. Control did not require authority. It required anticipation. The ability to supply what was expected before it was asked for.
He learned that quickly.
Michael became predictable.
He arrived early and waited without shifting his weight. He kept his hands folded, fingers still. His answers were precise, never expansive, never defensive. He calibrated his voice the way others adjusted their posture, lowering it when concern was expected, steadying it when reassurance was required.
They relaxed around him.
His file grew heavier, its language increasingly kind. Cooperative. Demonstrates insight. Shows sustained improvement. A success case in progress. The phrase appeared more than once, as though repetition might make it permanent.
When asked about long-term goals, Michael spoke of finishing his diploma. Of stable work. Of rebuilding his life. He spoke carefully, shaping each sentence so it could be repeated without distortion.
Everything he said was true.
It was also incomplete.
They never asked what he planned to rebuild it around. They did not ask what he had learned to excise. They did not ask how easily he could sit in silence now, remembering the small animal he had found once at the side of the road—how still it had been, how intact, how only the eyes had suggested the moment something inside it had understood too late.
That memory had taught him something valuable about appearances.
They closed their folders. They scheduled the next review. They marked him as compliant, improving, safe.
Michael thanked them. He stood. He left exactly as expected.
And behind the careful manners, behind the correct answers and softened language, something remained untouched—observing, patient, and no longer waiting to be named.
—————
One afternoon, while waiting for his session, Michael overheard a nurse speaking quietly near the desk.
"…she's overseas now, right?"
There was a pause—paper shifting, a lowered voice.
"Internship."
Michael did not react.
He did not look up from the floor tiles, did not adjust his posture, did not alter the careful rhythm of his breathing. There was no visible response for anyone to catalogue.
The information simply settled into place.
It fit with a sensation so precise it almost felt physical, like the last piece of a puzzle sliding home without resistance. Distance was not absence. Distance was refinement. Space in which things could continue uninterrupted.
She was living.
Growing.
Becoming more herself.
Exactly as she had before.
The symmetry pleased him.
Michael no longer imagined confrontation. Confrontation implied resistance, struggle, variables that could not be controlled. He had learned the inefficiency of force. What mattered was alignment.
He dreamed instead of recognition. Of moments when the world adjusted itself subtly, when what was unnecessary fell away on its own. Moments when patterns revealed themselves and meaning became obvious, unavoidable.
Those moments could not be rushed.
They arrived only when conditions were correct.
And conditions, like people, responded well to guidance.
Dr Lim asked him one final question at the end of a particularly long session. Her tone was neutral, careful.
"Do you think about her often?"
Michael paused. He weighed the answer, not for honesty but for accuracy. Performance was easy. Precision required discipline.
"Not often," he said at last. "But consistently."
Dr Lim frowned, just slightly. "What's the difference?"
"Often is noise," Michael replied calmly. "Consistency is structure."
She hesitated. Her pen hovered, then moved on.
She did not write that down.
But she did not challenge it either.
And Michael noted that, quietly, filing it away with the same care he applied to everything else that mattered.
—————
Later that night, Michael stood at the window again.
The corridor lights had dimmed, leaving the glass dark enough to act as a mirror. He did not look at his own reflection. He focused on the railing outside, on the narrow strip of metal where the bird had perched before.
It was empty now.
The absence registered without disappointment. Disappointment belonged to uncertainty, and Michael no longer dealt in that. What had been there had moved on. Movement implied intention. Intention implied return.
Absence did not mean loss.
It meant progression.
Some things did not announce themselves. They did not circle, did not call attention to their approach. They simply arrived when the environment allowed for it, when resistance had been worn thin enough to be irrelevant.
And when they arrived, they did not ask permission.
They expected to be welcomed.
Michael rested his fingertips against the glass. It was cold, but not unpleasant. Cold sharpened focus. He imagined the precise moment of arrival—not as a collision, but as a correction. A quiet adjustment. The world aligning itself the way it always eventually did.
He closed his eyes.
In the darkness behind them, there was no impatience. No hunger. Only readiness, steady and contained. Waiting was a temporary state, useful only until conditions matured.
Michael had learned to recognise that moment.
He stepped back from the window, already certain of it.
He was no longer waiting.
He was ready.