Morning sunlight felt cruel after nights like these.
He dragged himself out of bed long past the hour his alarm had tried—and failed—to rouse him. The room was small, cluttered with unwashed mugs, loose sheets of homework, and an old desk lamp that flickered whenever it pleased. A faint draft crept in from the half-open window, stirring the stack of notebooks into restless rustles.
Yawning, he pulled on a wrinkled shirt and slung his bag over his shoulder. His reflection in the mirror by the door caught his attention only long enough for him to notice the shadows beneath his eyes—dark crescents, like bruises earned not from fists but from stubborn dreams.
Classes blurred together. He sat at the back of the lecture hall, chin propped on one hand, eyes drifting constantly toward the sunlit windows. The professor's voice droned on about equations and formulas, but none of it reached him. His pen scribbled half-hearted notes until the words bled into meaningless lines.
It wasn't the content that exhausted him. It was the absence.
The girl's face lingered in his mind, pale against the backdrop of night, her voice echoing with that strange fragility. "I'm only here when the moon shines."
He tapped his pen against the page, restless. Nobody else would have believed him—not his classmates, not his friends. They would laugh and tell him he needed sleep. Maybe they'd be right. Maybe he was sleep-deprived enough to imagine her.
But the memory of her touch—her shoulder brushing his sleeve—was too sharp to be a dream.
At lunch, his friend Jin found him staring blankly at his tray of untouched rice. Jin was all energy, always talking with his hands, his hair perpetually messy as though he'd run through the wind itself.
"You look like a corpse," Jin said, dropping into the seat across from him with a dramatic sigh. "Again. Do you even sleep anymore?"
"Sometimes."
"Sometimes isn't an answer. What are you doing, sneaking into cemeteries at night? Haunting your own apartment?"
He didn't reply. He couldn't. The words—I've been meeting a girl who only exists under the moonlight—burned in his throat, absurd even to himself. He forced a shrug instead.
"Just… can't sleep."
Jin studied him for a long moment before rolling his eyes. "Fine. But when you collapse in the middle of class, don't expect me to carry you. I've got my own problems."
And just like that, the conversation moved on, Jin diving into a long-winded story about the girl he was trying to impress, while he sat in silence, half-listening, half-drifting.
The day wore on in fragments. The chalk squeak of professors. The chatter of classmates. The shuffle of papers and the dull ache of fatigue. By the time the sun began to sink, painting the sky in streaks of orange and violet, his pulse quickened with a strange anticipation.
Night would come soon.
And with it, her.
As the first star flickered into view, he found himself already walking the familiar path toward the park, his steps steady, his heart unsteady.
It was ridiculous, maybe. Reckless, certainly. But in the loneliness of his days, the thought of her was the only thing that felt alive.
And so he chased the moon again.