I’m not going to lie, when Senni started dating Samppa, I was devastated. When she just had flings, I could pretend it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to see it all the time, didn’t have to think about it too much. But now it was different. Now I knew I’d see them together every day, in class, at lunch, in every space I couldn’t escape. I was already feeling more and more isolated, and suddenly the one person who had felt safe was slipping further away, becoming part of a world I was now barely allowed into.
Me and Senni used to sit next to each other in class. It was our quiet habit and just knowing she was there made everything feel a little more bearable. But now she sat with Samppa. And I sat alone. And the gap between us started to feel like more than just an empty chair. It felt like a wound everyone could see but no one acknowledged. And while I tried to shrink into silence, tried not to feel too much, they didn't shrink at all.
They showed affection — subtle but constant. I had no place to hide from it. Not in the classroom, not in the hallways, not even in my own mind. Their closeness wasn’t just painful. It was loud. It made my pain feel irrelevant, even absurd. And the worst part? I wasn’t allowed to say anything. If I spoke, I was obsessive. If I stayed silent, I was distant. If I hurt, I was unstable. There was no version of me that was allowed to be human.
And of course, they had the right to show affection toward each other. No one should be denied basic human connection or comfort. But - and this is important - the way it happened mattered, because of how it affected me in that context.
I wasn’t just seeing two people being affectionate. That affection didn’t unfold in a vacuum. It was happening in the same spaces where I now sat alone, where I had once felt seen and safe next to her. It was happening in the place where I was already being treated as a burden, a disruption, even a threat. It’s not about blaming them for wanting closeness. It’s about recognizing that the visibility of their intimacy - so public, so casual - felt like a denial of my pain. A pain that was still raw, and still very real.
Both things can be true at the same time: Yes, they had the right to be together, to comfort each other. And yes, it hurt me deeply to see it because I hadn’t stopped hurting.
The problem wasn’t the affection itself. It was the way it unfolded without care or awareness of how it landed on me. There was no space made for what I was still carrying. No space for the pain or the loss.
What could they have done differently? Maybe not much, if physical comfort was all they were capable of giving each other. But a little sensitivity would have gone a long way. A moment of acknowledgment. A bit of discretion, instead of letting that intimacy become a public fixture in our shared classroom. A willingness to hear me out, instead of getting angry when I tried to protect myself. But that didn’t happen. Instead, when I said “this hurts,” I became the problem. Again. And that’s what isolation does. It doesn’t just leave you alone. It makes you feel like your pain isn’t even allowed to exist.
But that wasn’t all. One time I remember we were doing a project together. Everyone in the class had their own project or worked in small groups, and I was really proud of what Senni and I were creating. But then Senni made a decision I found out only after the magazine came out. She had told the graphics team to insert an advertisement into our magazine. And there he was — Samppa, among the faces in the ad.
She hadn’t asked. She hadn’t even mentioned it to me. That wasn't a creative disagreement or necessary in any way. It wasn’t even something she was suppose to do. She wasn’t responsible for the adds in the magazine. It was a clear symbolic gesture: My feelings didn’t mean anything, my opinion didn’t matter. It felt like I was being pushed out of something I helped to build. When I confronted her about it, she got angry. She flipped it back on me, made me the problem. Looking back, I can see the pattern: every time I tried to set a boundary to protect myself, to say, “this hurts,” she reacted with blame. There was no room for my side of the story. No room for my perfectly normal pain.
That pain only deepened when I needed to get some extra working hours for the course. My own project didn’t have enough, and I saw that a lot of people were helping out Samppa’s group. So I asked him if I could contribute somehow and get a few hours in. I saw immediately the way Senni looked at him. Like she was silently saying, “Don’t you dare let her in.” And Samppa got the message. He told me to just write something small on Facebook about their project, and that was it. Senni didn’t need to say anything to Samppa because her look said enough. So he gave me a token task, something meaningless, something to get me off their backs. It wasn’t collaboration. It was dismissal, dressed up as inclusion. Now they had started to exclude me in the class as well.
So I started showing my feelings more: the hurt, the frustration, the fear and yes, the jealousy. I remember once when we were heading to Jens’ place together, and Samppa called Senni to say he was coming along too. I sent him a sharp message, something like, “Do you have to be everywhere? Can’t I have even one place where you’re not?”
Senni got furious at me when Samppa didn’t come. But it wasn’t just me being mean to him. It wasn’t just about Samppa. Sometimes when you’ve been hurt, you can’t speak the words, or you don’t find them, especially when you fear those words will be mocked, dismissed, or used against you. So it comes out sideways through anger, through passive-aggression, through lashing out. When I acted out, I was defending a wound inside me that I didn’t know how to explain without fear of being more excluded. It was a desperate attempt to claim even a tiny bit of space for myself. Just one place where I didn’t have to be reminded I was being left behind.
It was my clumsy attempt to set boundaries but Senni just got angry, so angry. She centered to his hurt feelings, not mine. And again, the pattern happened: when I was in pain, my pain was treated as disruptive or wrong. But when others were uncomfortable, my pain became the thing that had to be punished. The fact is, I was just being human. I was showing the only way I knew at that moment that I was hurting. And people seeing that just treated me like I was the problem, not the situation.
While Senni was getting closer to Samppa, the atmosphere in the class toward me grew heavier. Tighter. Like everyone had silently agreed I wasn’t part of the group anymore. I remember one day walking home from school and seeing almost the whole class ahead of me some distance away. They were laughing, talking and just existing together in a way that used to feel possible for me too.
I didn’t want to be alone, so I called Jens and asked if they could wait a second so I could catch up. I saw him take his phone out of his jacket and look at the screen. But he didn’t answer. He just slid it back into his pocket. A few people turned around, looked straight at me. Then just turned back again. Nobody said anything. Nobody waited. They just kept walking.
That moment may seem small. But microaggressions often are. That’s what makes them so hard to explain. Nobody shouted at me. Nobody called me names. But their silence spoke louder. The way Jens looked at his phone and then deliberately ignored my call was a choice. The way others glanced at me, saw me, and then looked away was a message. It told me I wasn’t wanted. That I didn’t belong. That I shouldn’t have even tried.
And maybe if that had happened once, it would have hurt but not broken me. But it wasn’t once. It was constant. A slow, grinding repetition of being left out, overlooked, avoided, dismissed. And every time I started to wonder if I was imagining it, something like this would happen again confirming it. Microaggressions work like that. They isolate you while making you doubt your right to feel hurt. They make you wonder if maybe you really are the problem. If maybe you’re asking for too much. But I wasn’t. I was just asking to be included. To be seen. To be treated like a human being.
And then one day it happened. The thing that shattered me completely.
Senni was talking to me again about Samppa and their relationship. I couldn’t hide how upset I was, it probably even showed on my face. And then she looked at me, hurt, and said: “Why can’t you just be happy for me?”
That hit me hard. It hit me deep. I felt ashamed and guilty. I wasn’t being the kind of friend she deserved. So I made a decision, once again, to tuck my own feelings away and to be the friend she deserved. And I really did try. With all the strength I had in me. And for a little while, it actually seemed to be working.
As part of my new “being happy for my friend’s relationship” me, Samppa, Senni, and I went out together. We actually had a nice time. We met someone from our faculty and decided to all go to my place to watch a movie. So we went there - unfortunately, we were stupid enough to wake up Camilla as well - and we all were supposed to go to my room to watch the movie.
But Samppa and Senni started feeling tired, so they asked if they could sleep on the mattress in the kitchen. Both of their apartments were only a few hundred meters from mine, so I don’t understand why they wanted to stay there, but I said okay. They stayed in the kitchen, while Camilla, the other person from our faculty, and I went to my room to watch the movie.
At some point, I wanted to go for a cigarette, so I went to get my coat from the hallway. Now, the hallway is right next to the kitchen and our kitchen didn’t have a door which was of course very obvious. And then, while grabbing my coat, I saw them having sex in my kitchen.
I remember just turning the lights on and telling them to get the fuck out. One of them -can’t remember which - said that I should give them a moment.
I went out to my balcony and smoked a cigarette. I saw them leaving the house. Senni was leaning against Samppa and both of them were smiling.