The hostel was louder at night than Zina expected, laughter echoed from the hallway. Pots clanged in the communal kitchen. Someone played a love song too loud on their speaker, and someone else shouted for them to reduce the volume.
Zina lay still on her bunk, staring at the ceiling, letting her thoughts drift between the soft hum of noise and the louder ache inside her. She hadn't spoken much that day. She had attended her first lectures, Introduction to Communication, Nigerian History, Use of English and spent most of it observing. People were quick to make friends. Quick to laugh. Quick to belong, She didn't know how to belong anymore.
That night, long after the noise began to die down, she heard Bola whispering into her phone. Sweet words in Yoruba, followed by a giggle and a sigh. Favour scrolled endlessly through her feed, the glow of her screen reflecting in her glasses. Nancy snored.
Zina turned her face to the wall.
And there, as if summoned by the quiet, the memory returned, the room in Daniel's house.
Dark. The air stiff. His voice low and rough.
"You should act like a wife." She remembered how small she felt, how her voice folded into her throat and disappeared.
She pressed her fingers into her chest, like trying to hold her heart still, sleep came slowly not as a friend, but a fog.
---
Morning was kinder.
The sun slanted through the window in golden lines. Zina washed her face, tied her scarf, and followed her roommates to class. It was during a group registration session that she saw him.
He stood near the admin block, a book in one hand, a pen in the other. Not overly handsome, just average, maybe even fair. But there was something in his posture, the way he talked freely with others, that made him hard to miss. He seemed familiar with everyone, like someone who had been there long before her.
Zina couldn't tell whether he was a fresher like her or an upper-level student. But his name was already being echoed in passing conversations casually, fondly. He carried a kind of presence, and Zina felt herself noticing. She tried not to.
When her course form slipped from her folder and scattered under a nearby bench, he noticed.
"Careful," he said, handing her the missing sheet. "Thanks," she replied, her eyes barely holding his. He smiled and walked away.
She didn't ask his name.
But his voice lingered longer than she wanted it to. It was around this time she began chatting with someone she met online , a sweet, thoughtful guy living in Italy. Unlike most boys she had known, he didn't rush her or flirt carelessly. He listened. He asked questions. He was serious about her. And yet, the distance stretched like an unanswered question between them.
Zina didn't want to freeze her life waiting.
She wanted to feel again, fully, presently, not just through screens or imagined futures.
While waiting for her online lover on one side of her heart, the other side opened its doors too easily. Everything was moving fast, her emotions, her thoughts, the attention she was receiving, the long-buried need to be wanted.
She wasn't sure if it was healing… or a new kind of confusion.
---
That night, Zina wrote a single sentence in her diary:
Maybe tomorrow will feel different.
She closed it, placed it beneath her pillow, and turned to the wall again.
This time, the dark didn't feel as heavy.