bullying

The Weight of Quiet Snow
Liam stared at the page, the equations blurring into an indecipherable squall. Third-year quantum mechanics. Wave functions, probabilities, observer effects. It felt less like science and more like some elaborate, cruel joke. Three empty coffee cups stood sentinel around his laptop, a testament to hours that had dissolved into a haze of caffeine and creeping dread. The clock on his screen read 2:17 AM. Paper due Friday. He was sinking, quicksand made of textbooks and his own spiraling inadequacy.
By HAADI8 days ago in Education
Ink, Dust, and Regret
The fluorescent hum of Mrs. Albright’s senior English class was a constant buzz saw in Leo’s brain. Everything about her room felt old, smelled like old paper and chalk dust, even though the school had been 'renovated' a decade ago. Mrs. Albright herself, a woman carved from granite and tweed, had a voice that could slice through the thickest teenage apathy. She loved Shakespeare. Leo hated Shakespeare. He hated *anything* with 'thee' or 'thou' in it, frankly. He spent most of her lessons staring out the window, tracing the cracks in the glass, imagining he was anywhere but there. He was going to scrape by, he always did. Just enough effort to not fail, not enough to stand out.
By HAADI9 days ago in Education
The Static Flock
Unit 734 knew its purpose. To sanitize. To maintain cleanliness protocols across Sector Gamma-7. Its optical sensors registered particulate matter with absolute precision, its brushes hummed at calibrated frequencies, its waste compactors compressed detritus into neat, manageable cubes. Every night, it docked, a low thrum indicating power intake, diagnostics running in the background, a silent, efficient cycle. This was its existence, defined by logic, by order, by the absence of anomaly.
By HAADI13 days ago in Education
The Unwound Hour
Silas worked in a quiet dust. The air in his shop, "Silas's Timepiece Repair," hung thick with the ghosts of forgotten minutes, of brass and polished wood, of faint clock oil and the mildew that clung to everything old. He ran a calloused thumb over the face of a pocket watch, a broken thing, its hands frozen at a quarter past three, like a startled bird. He’d seen a thousand of these. Each one a tiny, complex history. He breathed out, a puff of dust motes dancing in the single shaft of sun slicing through the grime-streaked window.
By HAADI16 days ago in Education
Red Ink, Unread Words
The cardboard box smelled of dust and forgotten things, shoved under the bed for God knows how long. Michael tugged it out, the scrape of it on the worn floorboards a harsh sound in the quiet apartment. He wasn't looking for anything specific, just clearing out, the way you do when you’re thirty and still living in the same damn place you swore was temporary. Inside, beneath a tangled mess of old charging cables and a deflated football, he found it.
By HAADI17 days ago in Education
The Surface of Understanding
Liam stared at the structural analysis textbook, the lines of force and vectors blurring into an angry scribble on the page. Midnight. The sterile glow of his desk lamp did nothing but highlight the exhaustion etched around his eyes. A first-year architecture student, he was supposed to be absorbing this, internalizing it, making it sing. Instead, his brain felt like a clogged drain, every new piece of information just swirling uselessly on the surface. His father’s words, heavy and proud, about 'building things that last,' echoed in his skull. Liam just wanted to build a bridge to understanding, anything, to get past this wall.
By HAADI18 days ago in Education
The Chromatic Chill
Leo sat at the scarred oak desk, knuckles white. The air in Mrs. Evelyn’s third-grade classroom always smelled of pencil shavings and something vaguely like old chalk dust mixed with fear. He hated math. Not the idea of it, not the logic, just… the numbers. They were loud. They had tastes. And some of them were just plain wrong.
By HAADI19 days ago in Education
The Dust of Kaelenor
Liam felt it like a phantom limb, an ache for a place he'd never once seen, never walked. Not in his waking life, anyway. It was Kaelenor, or what was left of it, a kingdom rumored lost to the earth long before history decided to jot itself down proper. He found it in the periphery of dusty texts, in the footnotes of forgotten scholars who'd dismissed it as myth. But for Liam, in the quiet hum of the university library, surrounded by the smell of old paper and stale coffee, Kaelenor was as real as the blood thrumming behind his eyes. A longing, sharp and persistent, gnawed at him, a longing for something just out of reach, something ancient and deeply, impossibly familiar.
By HAADI20 days ago in Education
The Scholar's Ache
The air in the Old Reading Room hung thick, heavy with the scent of dried glue, forgotten tea, and a thousand years of settled dust. Elias, slumped at the long oak table, felt it press down on him, a physical weight. Not just the air, but the silence too, a kind of judgment, broken only by the rustle of vellum or the cough, politely stifled, from a pale figure across the room. He hated it here. Hated the quiet, hated the way the light, filtered through grime-streaked gothic windows, made everything look sepia-toned and dead. But mostly, he hated the book in front of him.
By HAADI21 days ago in Education
The Wet City's Blueprint
Leo’s back screamed. Three AM. The fluorescent tubes above hummed, a flat, sickly sound that had burrowed into his skull hours ago. Empty instant ramen cups, a discarded bag of stale potato chips, and a mountain of crinkled tracing paper formed an archeological dig around his workstation. He was just another ghost in the architecture studio, one of the dozen or so still clinging to their desks, fueled by caffeine and the sheer terror of Friday’s final review.
By HAADI22 days ago in Education
The Weight of Light
The air in Silas’s workshop always hung thick with the tang of dust, spent flux, and something else, something sharp and cold, like splintered winter. Jory wiped sweat from his brow with the back of a hand, leaving a smear of grime. Another failure. The crystal shard, meant to be a delicate petal, lay on the scarred workbench, a jagged, useless ghost. It looked like it had exploded inward, a star collapsing, but it was just Jory’s clumsy grip, his too-much pressure, his desperate impatience.
By HAADI23 days ago in Education
The Static Field and the Flicker
Unit 734 knew its purpose. It was etched into its core programming, hardwired through every circuit: analysis, optimization, maintenance. Its days were a perfect loop of sensor input, data collation, and predictive output. It managed the climate control for Sector Gamma-7, a sterile corporate wing where humans made noise and drank bitter liquid. Its world was logic, clean and irrefutable. Every nanosecond accounted for. Every variable quantified. There was no room for error, no capacity for deviation. It was efficient.
By HAADI25 days ago in Education