My teacher says, "Observation is a kind of violence." He means physics, I think. I didn’t think physics could feel personal.

 

Every morning, my alarm clock pulls me from the muck of my dreams at exactly 6:37 AM. The number’s not random; it’s just what time it has to be for me to have twenty-three minutes to stare at the ceiling and convince myself to get up. Twenty-three minutes feels like enough to hate my life, and not so much that I’ll start to enjoy it.

 

The lecture hall smells like burned coffee and someone else’s mornings. My chair is cold.

 

I see him standing in front of the chalkboard, half-erased equations smudged like bruises across the black. He grins when he talks about light, calls it greedy, says it wants to be both wave and particle. "But we make it choose," he says, "the moment we look."

 

On the board: the observer effect. He writes it in crooked letters, his voice curling around the room. "Nothing is untouched by being seen.”

 

Electrons collapse when someone watches. Waves become particles, possibilities shrink to pinpricks. Observation turns infinity into one small, measurable thing. The wave function contains every possibility. The particle is just one. When the wave collapses, it’s not just that one reality appears—it’s that every other reality dies.

 

In seventh grade, they showed us a video of a bridge collapsing. Tacoma Narrows, 1940. The wind caught it just right, and the whole thing rippled like water. They called it resonance, but all I saw was something massive folding in on itself.

 

My teacher paused the video, said: "This was the moment." A finger pointed to the screen, a ripple frozen mid-collapse.

 

I wanted to ask: the moment for who? The bridge? The wind? The people who stood there, slack- jawed, holding cameras like they could save it by watching?

 

I didn’t ask. I just wrote it down.

 

The thing about physics is it doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t care about your childhood trauma or your existential crises. Gravity doesn’t lessen its grip because you’re tired of falling. Time doesn’t slow because you’re afraid of what’s ahead. Entropy doesn’t reverse because you wish things were like they used to be. Physics doesn’t pity you—but it doesn’t judge you either.

 

I walked home that day. I always walk. The sidewalks are broken, buckled by tree roots, so I watch my feet. Don’t trip. Don’t draw attention.

 

It was loud. Not the act, but the silence after. Like when someone drops a plate at a party, and everything stops for a second, and you know the shards are never going to fit back together the way they were.

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My clothes stick to me like a second skin, and the streetlights buzz overhead. A car slows down next to me. I don’t look.

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On the corner, a man smokes a cigarette, holding it like a bastard. He watches the cars crawl by. I pass him and his eyes snag me, just for a second. It’s nothing, but it feels like something, and I hate it.

 

The gutters are full of leaves, drowning in the overflow. Everything smells like wet asphalt and something sour, something I can’t name.

 

There’s a cat in the gutter, torn up by something bigger. Its fur’s slick with rain and blood. I don’t stop to look.

 

There’s a library I go to when I can’t breathe.

 

I sit there, a book in front of me. Schrödinger’s cat. I hate that cat. No matter how many times I try to explain it to myself, it still feels cruel.

 

The fluorescent lights hum like they’re keeping a secret, and the books are soft-spined and tired. I sit by the window, my notebook open to a blank page, and I wait for something to come out of me.

 

The children outside are screaming. Not hurt, just loud. They play this game where they take turns jumping from the swing at its peak, seeing who can land without crying.

 

One of them lands wrong, her ankle folding like paper. She doesn’t cry. She just stands there, wobbling, her lip trembling like she’s waiting for someone to notice.

 

I don’t.

 

All the versions of me that didn’t go on the date, that stayed in bed, that slapped him the second his fingers brushed my wrist—they were gone. He watched me, and they died. When the wave collapses, it’s not just that one reality appears—it’s that every other reality dies.

 

At home, my mother’s peeling potatoes, her hands moving quick and rough. She doesn’t look up when I walk in.

 

“How was school?” she asks.

 

I lie. I say it was fine. I say nothing happened. She nods like she doesn’t believe me.

 

I go upstairs to my room. The door doesn’t lock, but I shut it hard and sit on my bed. I take deep breaths like they taught me in health class. I close my eyes, try to find the part of me that’s still moving in all directions, untouched.

 

Physics says you can’t un-observe something. Once it’s seen, it’s real. Permanent. I wish I could rewind, climb back into the box with Schrödinger’s stupid cat. I don’t care if it’s alive or dead. I just want to stay in the dark.

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