“soon time was nothing but a word. Life was just that oddly-intriguing person in the screen talking to her, and Jesse’s eyes glued on the screen, talking back. He was not enticingly attractive per-se; his glasses kept sliding down his nose, he had a little sniffle, and with his jumper just being the unfortunate size stuck between “fashionably-cool oversized” and “polished, perfect fit”, Jesse could have sworn he could have passed as any Computer Science major at her university. Yet, she knew he couldn’t be that. Everything else was…too perfect. The curls in his hair looked to be strategically placed— not one strand out of place. His skin was as clear as glass, and his teeth were perfectly straight. The eloquence in which he spoke those words, those hauntingly, beautiful words. What they were, Jesse could not tell. The charisma, power and love he poured into those words were more than enough to draw her in. The troubles she harboured in her mind faded away to a buzz in the background of the earth’s murmuring. The memories too. It was as if somebody put a straw into her cluttered mind and begun to slowly extract the gunk out, in turn also taking away anything and everything she had stored within her memories. She forgot she had ran away from home at 4am. She forgot she had only 5 dollars to her name. She forgot she was in an abandoned shed in the middle of the woods. She forgot the pain. She forgot. Forgot.
“You are safe now, Jesse. They can’t hurt you anymore.”
Those were the first words she actually understood. Comprehensible words. He didn’t have to say any more or any less. She understood what he knew. Jesse closed her eyes, feeling herself fade away into the dimness.”
This story was submitted as part of the Oxford Pilot Phase of the Gen Z Role Models Project.
“soon time was nothing but a word” (S122) © 2026 by The Gen Z Role Models Project is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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