A language professor's mounting strain threatens to unravel her life

Layal moves through the campus corridors with a tightness that seems to have replaced the habit she just abandoned. The air in her lecture hall feels thinner, each pause from her students echoing louder than any lecture she has ever given. Their hesitant answers and half-finished sentences prick at a patience that has long been eroded, and she watches the clock with a growing sense of urgency that has little to do with time and everything to do with a need for control. In the quiet of her car she presses play on a meditation program, hoping the soft voice will smooth the edges of her thoughts, but the recordings compete with the hum of the engine and the lingering weight of a mother's frailty back in Beirut. The news of her mother's fall arrived like a sudden draft, chilling the already fragile calm Layal tries to cultivate. She imagines the hospital room, the stillness of a body that once moved with purpose, and feels a knot tighten around her chest. Each day she balances the demands of a classroom that feels increasingly hostile, the personal battle of staying smoke-free, and the distant ache of a family crisis she cannot physically attend. The tension builds in the spaces between her breaths, and she walks the line between composure and collapse, searching for a moment of peace that feels ever more elusive.