By mid-semester, the pulse of Farquhar University had become familiar, oppressive and exhilarating in equal measure. The libraries smelled faintly of paper and sweat; lecture halls reverberated with the same hum of ambition and quiet desperation. I walked those hallways with Judah more often now, our schedules meshing like two separate rhythms trying to sync. He always carried his notebook, scribbling in loops of ink I couldn’t decipher, and I found myself stealing glances at the curl of his handwriting, as intimate as a signature pressed into skin.

​

It was after one of those endless tutorial discussions that I noticed it. He lingered in the library after everyone had left, pulling out an extra chair for me even though I didn’t need it. He spoke quietly, seriously, about graduate schools and potential research topics, and then — almost casually — he began talking about “when we’re done here, Ames.” The words fell lightly, but they were heavy, carrying a weight I hadn’t anticipated. A future, not a wish, not a maybe.

I froze, unsure whether to laugh or retreat. I had never pictured my life with anyone else, and yet there he was, stitching a possibility into the fabric of my present. His eyes held the familiar gravity, the same attention he gave my stories, but now it felt like he was surveying a map he wanted us both to walk.

I didn’t know if I wanted forever — or if I even believed in it. But I found myself nodding, tentatively, willing to test the waters. I said nothing, letting him fill the silence with plans that might someday include me.

Denise, of course, noticed. She leaned across my desk one night, smirk tugging at her lips. “So, what, he’s building castles in your name now? Are you going to tell him he’s over-engineering?” Her tone was teasing, but her eyes were sharp. She had a knack for reading the edges I didn’t want to see. I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll let him,” I said, though my voice was quieter than I intended.

The subtle signs were always there, though. Little things that didn’t make themselves obvious until later. The way Judah preferred long, silent walks over spontaneous nights out. The way I wanted to talk endlessly about feelings and he answered in gestures — leaving me to parse meaning from the curl of his hand or the pause in his voice. He imagined a future I could almost see, but only in fragments that left me questioning the whole. Our lives moved in parallel, only occasionally intersecting fully.

Yet there were moments — small, shining, unavoidable — when our worlds collided with a force I didn’t know I wanted. Like the time we stayed up until dawn on the rooftop after a disastrous tutorial presentation, talking about whether the mind could truly know itself. The sky turned from indigo to rose, and he reached for my hand, squeezing it lightly as if to say, you’re here, with me, and maybe that’s enough for now.

I let myself imagine what it would be like to walk through life with him, without fully committing to the thought. My fingers lingered in his during the quiet moments, my head rested against his shoulder when the university felt too heavy, and I whispered the stories I still hadn’t told anyone. He absorbed them, like always, and offered nothing but presence in return. And yet, in that same absence, I could feel the unbridgeable distance that defined us.

Denise burst into our routine occasionally, reminding me — with laughter, a shove, or a teasing remark — that life existed outside the careful orbit Judah and I had built. She was loud, insistent, messy, a hurricane against our carefully drawn lines. Sometimes, I envied her certainty, the way she threw herself into life with abandon. And I worried: what if our differences — the things we didn’t speak aloud — quietly pulled us apart while I lingered on what might be?

Still, I let myself try. Step by tentative step. I let his presence in, I let his plans brush against my own, and I let the possibility of us hover in the spaces between lectures, late-night walks, and whispered confessions on the roof. And I kept watching him, noticing — without needing to name it — the subtle ways he tried to fit our lives together, the quiet care in the way he considered my moods, the steady pulse of his hand in mine. The tension between what I wanted and what he imagined never left, but for the first time, I didn’t push it away entirely.

Because maybe, for now, trying was enough.
***
The weeks that followed folded into a rhythm of quiet intensity. I learned to recognize Judah’s subtle cues: the way his hand would brush mine almost accidentally but linger just long enough to make me aware, the way he paused before speaking as if choosing each word with the care of a sculptor. His presence was a constant, patient thing — the kind of solidity I hadn’t known I craved. And yet, I found myself measuring it, holding it at arm’s length, afraid that leaning too close might break something delicate and irreversible.

Denise, of course, noticed everything. She would lean against my desk during my late-night study sessions, elbow propped up, smirk teasing at the corners of her lips. “You two,” she whispered to me one night, waving a hand vaguely in Judah’s direction, “you’re like a slow-motion disaster. He’s building a life around you, and you’re tiptoeing around it like it’s made of glass. Just tell me you’re enjoying it.”

“I think I am,” I said, quietly, too aware of Judah’s head bent over his notes across the library table. He didn’t look up. He never did when Denise made a comment like that — he simply adjusted his glasses and scribbled, as if the very act of writing could contain the possibilities he envisioned for us.

Denise rolled her eyes. “You’re ridiculous. You should just take the leap, or push him off a cliff. Pick a side already, Ames.” She laughed, and I wanted to laugh too, but the weight of Judah’s silence pressed against my chest.

Sometimes, I caught him imagining me in his future in ways I wasn’t sure I wanted. He would casually mention conferences in cities I’d never been to, internships that required precision and discipline, plans for research collaborations that assumed I would be by his side. And yet, each time, I felt that familiar knot in my stomach — a mixture of longing and hesitation. It wasn’t fear, exactly. It was a sense that my desires didn’t quite fit into the clean lines of his imagination. I wanted to wander sometimes; he wanted us to march forward together. I thrived in fragments and messiness; he thrived in order and certainty.

But our closeness didn’t falter. It merely shifted, flexed, like a rope pulled taut but not yet snapped.

One rainy evening, we found ourselves on the rooftop again, the city slicked and shining beneath us. The wind tugged at my hair, and I pulled my sweater tighter around my shoulders. Judah handed me a thermos of tea — strong, bitter, exactly how I liked it. We drank in silence, watching the droplets cling to the railings and the city lights refract through them.

“You know,” he said, voice low, “I think about it sometimes. After graduation. Where we might be. What it would look like to wake up and see you every day.”

I pressed my lips together, unsure whether to answer. “And do you see me there?” I asked finally.

“Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “I do.”

I let his words sit with me, warm but heavy. They were an offer, a promise, and also a weight I wasn’t ready to lift. I wanted to answer, to say that maybe I could see him there too, but part of me feared the inevitable friction between our rhythms — my love of chaos, his craving for structure — would eventually splinter the image he was building.

Denise would have laughed at my hesitation. She would have said, Of course you’re scared. That’s what it means to care. 

Judah and I stayed on the roof until the rain slowed to a drizzle, talking about everything and nothing, our words floating like smoke in the wet air. I traced the lines of his palm with my finger, memorizing the weight of him without pressing for more. He offered me his time, his attention, his presence — and that was everything I needed in the moment. But even as I let myself rest against him, I felt the subtle, persistent tug of difference: the things we could never articulate, the small hesitations, the ways our hearts moved in parallel rather than fully together.

It didn’t matter yet. For now, it was enough to try, to meet him halfway in a world that demanded certainty we didn’t fully possess. And maybe, just maybe, that tentative space — fragile, provisional, and imperfect — was enough to call love.
***
Graduate from university. Get a job. Get married. Have a child.

That’s the script. For some people, it fit like a glove. Everyone I’d known in secondary school and university — everyone except Denise and Judah, my only real anchors — began posting photos of sparkling rings, captions humming with certainty, hashtags like punctuation on a life already written.

And there I was, watching it all happen while the milestones hovered over me like storm clouds I couldn’t escape. No amount of late-night calls to Denise, whispering my anxieties into her laughter-filled silences, no tubs of ice cream or bottles of nail polish could push me off that tide. I was stranded, marooned, unsure if the shore I’d washed up on was mine or just the one everyone told me to reach.

Because Judah and I had gone beyond the scripts. We had peeled each other open, layer by layer — fears, insecurities, the private landscapes we never let anyone else see. Eventually, we had traced each other’s bodies, marked the contours of our silences. And yet, we were something that could never be fully named. Not nothing, not everything—just a fragile, unsteady maybe. Not yet, perhaps never entirely.

Maybe after six years together, you start expecting a ring. 

But only because everyone wants you to.

***

His twenty-seventh birthday. Friday evening. A gathering at his family’s mansion, perched high above the city as it had always been. Chandeliers. Linen tablecloths. The soft, expensive hush of old money clinging to every room.

Judah’s sister found me first.

She slipped a bottle of champagne into the ice bucket beside the balcony doors, her smile knowing, conspiratorial. “For later,” she said lightly, brushing past me. Her hand lingered on my arm for just a second too long. I felt it then — a tightening, a small rearrangement of the air.

By the time I reached my third glass of rosé, the sense had settled into certainty. The careful guest list. The way his parents watched us from across the room. The way Judah kept glancing at his watch, then at me, then away again.

I thought, calmly, I will say yes. Not with joy, not with certainty — but with acceptance. With the quiet resolve I had learned so well. I loved him. We had built a life, hadn’t we? Surely that was enough.

When he took my hand, I followed him without resistance.

He knelt.

It was wrought gold, gleaming softly in the candlelight. Perfect. Of course it was. Judah was attentive that way — careful, exacting. I knew it would fit my finger before he even reached for my hand.

And then, as he opened his mouth, something shifted.

Not panic. Not fear. Just a clean, unmistakable knowing. 

I could see the life unfolding — tidy, elegant, planned. And I understood, all at once, that I would survive it. I would even do it well.

But I would never need him.

On the nights when my mind turned hostile — when sleep abandoned me and the world pressed in until breathing felt optional — I did not reach for Judah. I reached for cheap vodka. For my sister Celine’s voice, steady and familiar, counting me back into my body. Three things you can see. Two things you can hear. One thing you can touch.

I had learned how to live without my mother. Without my father. Without my sister beside me in the bunk bed we once shared. I had made it through that wreckage alone — scarred, yes, but standing.

I wasn’t unhappy. I wasn’t happy either.

But I knew, with terrible clarity, that Judah was not the answer to that.

He was not who I ran to when the darkness thickened and became familiar. And maybe that was the truth I had been avoiding all along: that I did not need him.

Not in the way you are supposed to need someone before you say yes to them forever.

***

It couldn't be helped, not really — that he'd thrown a party at his mansion on the hill one Friday night, invited all the old family friends and their children and their pedigree dogs and cats, and then dropped to one knee in front of all of them.

And it couldn't be helped, either, that when I didn't answer — when he slipped the ring onto my finger anyway, a perfect fit, of course — I slid it off, tucked it back into its velvet box, and closed the lid with a finality that silenced the room. Then I pressed it gently into his hands. "I'm sorry," I whispered. Then I turned around and ran out the door. 

The house behind me remained silent. No protests. No footsteps following. I ran until I reached the bottom of the hill. Kicked off my heels like they were made of glass and I'd finally realised they'd never fit.

No one chased after me. Not Judah. Not his parents. Not the life I'd left behind. And still, I kept running. Back to the neighbourhoods. Onto the train. Barefoot, my dress gathering dust, the stares of strangers brushing past me like sweet nothings. I didn't care. It was supposed to be the most important day of my life. But all I felt was relief.
***
I stopped in front of the flat that Judah and I had once shared. Fresh out of Farquhar, he had rented a four-room unit in the East, and we’d decided to room together to save on rent—my choice to move in, his quiet acquiescence, because he wanted me close to my family’s flat in Simei. At the time, I took it as a gesture of love, or at least friendship, and never questioned his sincerity. But now, standing alone beneath the harsh fluorescent lights of the HDB corridor, I couldn’t help but wonder what else I had missed — so completely, so utterly.

I wasn't sure how long I sat there, legs pulled tight to my chest, watching the MRT snake its way past the skyline. The city felt both distant and too close—like it might swallow me whole if I looked at it wrong. My phone buzzed several times — Judah, probably, or Denise, if she'd caught wind about it — but I couldn't bring myself to look.

​

My dress felt tight around my ribs. I sank to the floor by the window and didn't move for a long time, watching the dark, hearing nothing but the low chugging of the MRT train in the darkness as it snaked its way past the skyline. I closed my eyes and pictured it. Amelia Tay, the madwoman. Running away from Judah Chong, heir to Westerton Group and its sister company, who lived in a mansion in the heart of fucking Orchard, who owned more money than most families did in three generations, leaving him crestfallen on one knee, ring box still in his hand.

My best dress was wrinkled and stained from the pavement. My feet still ached from the run downhill, my shoes abandoned somewhere near Kallang. A girl on the train had asked me if I was okay. I'd nodded. That was all.

I wasn't sure how long I sat there, legs pulled tight to my chest, watching the MRT snake its way past the skyline. The city felt both distant and too close—like it might swallow me whole if I looked at it wrong. I got up slowly. Brushed my teeth. Poured a glass of water. Everything felt heavy and deliberate, like I was dragging my body through glue.

I was not sad. But I had the distinct feeling I had just left a life I was never meant to walk into.

Bio: Cecy Grace likes sleeping, reading and writing.