(Fiction) The Glitch In Her Reality – Chapter 3 – The First Cracks in the Script

Chapter 3: The First Cracks in the Script

It started on a Wednesday, which felt fitting somehow because Wednesdays are that weird middle child of the week, not fun enough to love and not bad enough to hate.

That day, Norah felt like something inside her had been quietly snapping for a while. Like a pencil bending slowly under pressure until finally it just broke without sound and nobody noticed, not even her, until later.

She was sitting in the library because it was one of the few places where nobody bothered you if you looked serious enough. She had mastered the serious face, the one where you furrow your brows and keep a pen in your hand, even if you are just staring at the same line of text for twenty minutes straight.

That is exactly what she was doing when she overheard two girls whispering near the psychology shelf, and one of them said, “I think some people just think too much, and that is their whole problem.”

Norah did not look up or turn around, but that sentence hit her like a low punch, like someone had accidentally read out her entire personality as if it was a flaw to be edited out. It made her heart feel heavy, not in a dramatic, poetic way, but in the way that makes you want to lie down on the floor and let the world walk around you.

Later that night, while brushing her teeth, she stared at her own face in the mirror and thought, Wow, this is the person I am stuck with forever. It made her laugh a little, but it also made her sad because she did not really know who that person was anymore. She was just playing roles depending on where she was and who she was with, and none of those roles felt like home.

She thought that maybe, if she could find just one person who saw the world like she did, someone who did not need small talk or forced smiles or morning motivation, then she would not feel so much like a fraud.

So she made a deal with herself that night that she would stop pretending, even just a little bit, and see what happened. See if the world ended, or if maybe, just maybe, something real began.