The campus flea market was its usual chaos — folding tables, crates of old vinyl, stacks of used textbooks nobody wanted. I was just looking for a cheap notebook for my morning lecture notes when I spotted a thick, unbranded journal in a bargain bin, bound in scuffed dark leather. The first several pages were filled with elegant cursive. I figured someone had abandoned an old creative writing project. I handed the vendor two dollars and stuffed it in my bag.
I didn't open it until almost midnight, back in my dorm room. I flipped to the first page mostly to see how much blank paper was left.
The first line stopped me cold. The entry was dated two weeks earlier, and it described my day — the exact time I woke up, the grey sweatshirt I'd worn, the burnt toast I'd scraped into the sink before running for the 8:10 bus.
I kept flipping, and it kept going. What I spent at the diner. Questions I'd asked in my biology seminar. Things I'd only ever muttered to myself walking through the parking lot at night, things I was certain no one could have overheard.
I went back to the vendor's booth number scrawled on my receipt and called the number the next morning, shaking, asking where he'd gotten it. He barely remembered the item — said a young guy, maybe early twenties, had dropped off a box of random books and journals the day before the market, told him to just sell whatever he could and keep the cash, no name given. He hadn't looked inside any of it.
That was the part that actually broke something loose in my chest. Whoever had been writing about me hadn't lost the journal by accident. They'd handed it off, deliberately, to a stranger, to be sold at a market they knew — somehow — that I would walk through. It wasn't lost. It was placed.
I went back to the last written page, dated three weeks from now. Almost the whole page was blank except for one line, centered, in the same careful handwriting:
He finally noticed me.
I don't know if that's a prediction or a plan. I don't know if "he" is someone I already know, or someone I haven't met yet, or someone who already thinks he knows me better than I know myself.
I haven't slept properly since I found it. I've started taking different routes to class. I check the peephole before I open my door. And some nights, lying awake, I find myself doing the math on that date three weeks out, wondering whether the safest thing I can do is nothing at all, and wait to see if it turns out to be true — or whether waiting is exactly what whoever wrote it is counting on me to do.