✧ Scene: The Whispers Within

✧ Scene: The Whispers Within

Zahra

That evening, Zahra sat in her room overlooking the tiled courtyard of the old house she’d rented. Her notes from the symposium were open, but she wasn’t reading.

She kept hearing her own words from earlier:

"What if we are not imagining meaning into the architecture —
but retrieving it, as those before us left it for us to find?"

It sounded naïve now. Romantic.
Even reckless.

Maybe that wasn’t insight. Maybe that was just longing, dressed up in scholarship.

Her breath shallowed.

She remembered how her voice had trembled just slightly when she saw him.
What if others noticed?

What if he noticed, and thought you were one of those women who creates meanings where there are none?

She closed the notebook.
Folded herself into silence.

And somewhere, faintly — not external, but not entirely her own — came the whisper:

You misread everything.
He didn’t come for you. He didn’t stay for you. This is only in your mind.
Your work is not enough. You are not enough.

Aaric

Back in Cambridge, the skies were already gray by afternoon.

Aaric sat at his desk, Zahra’s paper beside an unread stack of philosophy journals.

He’d told himself he would write to her. Just a simple message, scholarly, respectful.

He hadn’t.

Instead, he stared at the cursor on an empty draft.
And every few minutes, a different voice would take the mic in his mind:

She didn’t look surprised to see you. She looked away.
She’s not waiting for a stranger to interrupt her work with memories he can’t explain.
You want to be noble. But maybe you’re just afraid.

He stood, frustrated.
Tried to focus on his lecture notes.

But another whisper surfaced — one more dangerous because it sounded like virtue:

Don’t confuse spiritual attraction with fate.
You’ve done enough damage, projecting meaning onto passing things.
Let her go before you impose your need on her freedom.

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