The Phanton Exam

Exams leave, but they don’t really leave.

This morning, I woke up with my heart pounding. I could swear I had an exam. I almost reached for my notes before realizing — there was nothing left to revise. My exams were over. My brain just didn’t believe it.

It’s scary how a month of constant stress rewires you. You live in countdowns: two days left, one night left, six hours left. You wake up to alarm clocks you didn’t set. You dream of blank OMR sheets or missing pens. Even after the papers end, the panic stays, like muscle memory.

Nobody warns you about this part. How silence after chaos feels unnatural. How your body still reacts as if the war isn’t over. It’s a weird, alarming after-effect — a reminder that exams don’t just test knowledge, they test nerves, and nerves take longer to heal.

So if your heart still races for no reason, know this: you’re not broken. You just survived a season that demanded everything from you. It’s normal for the echo to linger. Give yourself time to unlearn the panic.