This story is about a Malaysian who thought the hardest part of moving to KL would be surviving university life, but discovered that the real danger was someone who slowly learned how to impersonate her and ‘live’ her life.
I used to think the hardest part about moving to KL was figuring out the MRT system.
Turns out, the real danger wasn’t outside, it was the person who slowly pulled a chair up to my life and made herself comfortable.
I was 20, studying at Taylor’s University on a partial scholarship.
A girl from Batu Pahat suddenly lived among students who wore branded sneakers like they were part of the uniform, trying to survive essays, group projects, and Sunway rent.
I wasn’t lonely. Just quiet. Trying to stay afloat.
Then Hana walked in.
We met in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences during an 8 am class everyone hated. She sat beside me, leaned over and whispered “If I fall asleep just kick me.”
I laughed and that was it.
She had that kind of charm. The thrifted outfits from SS15 that somehow looked customized, the big expressive eyes, the way she made every conversation sound like a secret. People loved her instantly.
She came from a complicated background. Bad breakup. Toxic housemate. Messy family. Stories told in fragments enough to make me think she needed someone safe.
She remembered small things. The brand of pen I used, the way I tapped my foot during exams, the exact moment I laughed in class.
She said things like,
“We’re the same, you and I.”
And I believed her because being understood felt rare.
She made KL feel less scary, less overwhelming.
I didn’t know then that attention can feel like affection and affection can feel like safety even when it isn’t.
The move in that should have been a warning
After a year of friendship, Hana asked if she could move in temporarily.
“My landlord increased rent. And… my housemate is dramatic. Long story.”
She said it brightly, casually, as if the details didn’t matter.
I didn’t ask why her housemate was “dramatic.”
I didn’t ask why Hana suddenly needed a new place.
I didn’t hesitate. Of course she could.
At first it felt like a long sleepover.
We cooked Maggi together, shared Grab rides to Taylor’s when it rained, stayed up late talking about fears and futures. She kept telling me “You’re the only person who understands me.”
But slowly, the boundaries dissolved.
She drifted into my wardrobe without asking. My tote bags. My skincare. My favourite hoodie.
“You have better style anyway,” she’d say, already wearing it.
Her tone was so gentle that disagreeing felt like kicking a kitten.
Then she drifted into my time.
“Come with me.”
“I don’t want to go alone.”
“You’re my only person.”
If I said I needed to study or rest, she’d sulk until I gave in.
The part where she replaced me
I brought her to a hangout with my focus group once, just once, at a cafe in Sunway where we usually studied.
They loved her.
After that, I noticed plans forming without me. Suddenly she was in group photos I hadn’t been invited to. People messaged her first before asking me anything.
She joined my assignment group for a Sociology class and somehow became the spokesperson.
My crush confronts me about messages I never sent
His name was Adam. Same degree. Same batch.
We bonded over complaining about readings and buying the cheapest kopi ais we could find near campus.
We texted sometimes about nothing important. Memes, assignment stress, random photos of the sky.
We were friendly, flirty even, in a painfully shy way.
One afternoon, he avoided me.
Not regular “Malaysian avoiding eye contact out of respect” avoiding.
Actual avoidance.
He walked past me outside Block B without a nod, without a smile, without anything.
“Adam!” I called.
He turned slowly as if he wished he hadn’t heard me.
“I got your messages.” he said. “I just wish you’d told me directly instead of texting late at night.”
My brain blanked.
“What? I never…”
He cut me off and showed me his phone.
Messages sent under my name.
From my number. My profile picture. Written the way I write, the same lowercase habits, the same way I apologise too much.
“I think it’s best we stop talking so much.”
“I don’t want anything more.”
“Please respect that.”
Every sentence felt like being slapped with a mirror.
“Adam, I swear to you, I didn’t write this.”
He stared at me for a long time, trying to decide if I was lying or unstable.
“You even sent a voice note.” he said quietly.
My heart dropped into my stomach.
“Play it.”
He did.
And for 3 horrifying seconds, it sounded like me.
But the intonation was wrong.
The breath was wrong.
The slight echo didn’t belong in my room.
My stomach collapsed. My mouth went dry. I tried to explain.
“You don’t have to make excuses. It’s okay.” he said and walked away.
I checked my phone but the messages were just… not there.
That night, I barely slept.
A part of my life had been rewritten without my permission.
But I told myself it was a glitch.
A hack.
Some stupid prank.
Until…..
The lecturer incident
It happened again. Different day. Different person.
A lecturer I respected pulled me aside.
“I read your email,” she said gently. “I’m sorry things are difficult but I still need your official withdrawal from the project.”
“My what?”
She turned her laptop toward me. There was an email from my student address.
Thanking her. Explaining that I was “too emotionally overwhelmed to contribute effectively.”
Asking to step back from group work.
It was written exactly like how I write when I’m nervous.
Polite.
Grateful.
Too many “sorrys”.
My heart hammered against my ribs.
“I didn’t send this.” I said.
She gave me a look I’ve given to many people in my own life, the “I want to believe you but this is weird” look.
“It’s okay to ask for help.” she said softly.
I walked out of the classroom feeling like someone had crawled under my skin and rearranged my sense of reality.
I felt I couldn’t tell anyone. Who would believe me?
That someone was sending messages and emails in my voice?
That my words were being used without me speaking them?
It sounded ridiculous, even to me.
So I stayed quiet, hoping it would just stop. Because the alternative was too strange to say out loud.
I went home with shaking legs.
Hana was on my bed, scrolling on Instagram.
“Oh!” she smiled. “You’re back early.”
She looked up at me with the same gentle softness she used the night she cried on my shoulder.
The night everything started to make sense
One night, around midnight, Hana fell asleep curled under my blanket, a half eaten FamilyMart onigiri beside her. She had spent the entire evening complaining about how tired she was from “fixing everyone’s problems.”
At some point her phone buzzed. The screen lit up.
A name flashed: Farah Hassan(name changed)
My chest tightened. That name again.
She had mentioned Farah once, briefly, bitterly. saying only:
“She was unstable. I had to move out.”
Hana mumbled, rolled over and the phone slipped from her hand onto my side of the bed.
I picked it up wanting to place it back on the table, nothing more, but the screen glowed stubbornly.
Enter passcode.
My heart hammered.
I shouldn’t try. I shouldn’t even be holding it.
Except…
A week earlier, while we were waiting outside the library, she had offered me her hotspot because my data finished.
“Just connect lah,” she said, laughing. “My password’s the same for everything. I’m too lazy to remember different ones.”
I hadn’t meant to memorise it. It just stuck.
Now, staring at the lock screen that same password rose uninvited in my mind.
My hands were shaking.
I shouldn’t. But I typed it in.
And just like that, without planning it, without wanting it, the phone unlocked. I stepped into a part of her life she had kept hidden behind charm and tears and “you’re my only real friend here.”
My stomach dropped, heavy and cold.
A new message banner hovered at the top, still unread.
I tapped it open.
Farah Hassan: “After all the shit you did, you’re lucky I only kicked you out. Don’t ever contact me again. You try anything and I’ll make sure everyone knows what you really are.”
My blood thickened.
I scrolled up.
More messages.
Older ones.
None kind.
“You ruined my life.”
“You lied about me to everyone.”
“Get help.”
“You’re sick, Hana. Stay away from girls who don’t know you yet.”
Girls?
Not “people.”
Girls?
My heart skipped a beat.
Then halfway through the messages, I saw something that made my vision blur:
“Does your new housemate know what you did to me?”
My pulse thundered in my ears.
This wasn’t jealousy.
Or clinginess.
Or bad boundaries.
It was a pattern.
And it all made sense, like someone turned on the lights in my brain
It wasn’t a glitch or a stupid prank.
The plans that were made without me.
Class mates and friends pulling away.
The email.
Adam!!!
It was a pattern.
A trail of girls.
A trail of damage.
A trail leading straight to me.
A HISTORY.
I slowly placed the phone back where it had fallen.
My heart was racing.
Without thinking, I grabbed my own phone and walked out of the flat into the poorly lit hallway.
Farah’s number burned into my mind after seeing the messages.
I typed them in manually.
My fingers trembled.
Hi… you don’t know me, but I’m living with Hana. Can we talk?
Three dots appeared almost instantly.
Then vanished.
Then reappeared.
Finally, one message came through:
“Get out while you still can.”
The world seemed to tilt.
The truth about Hana
Farah called instead of texting.
Her voice was calm, she sounded older than I expected, but there was a tired edge beneath it, the kind people get when they’ve told the same warning too many times and no one listened.
“I’m sorry if this scares you,” she began, “but I need you to hear it without sugarcoating.”
My throat tightened.
“Okay?”
“Hana doesn’t become your friend,” she said. “She becomes your world. Slowly. Quietly. She rewrites your routines until every choice goes through her first.”
I pressed my hand against my chest, feeling my heartbeat stutter.
“She did the same to me,” Farah continued. “She moved in ‘temporarily,’ said her housemates were mistreating her. She played helpless until I was the only one she depended on. Or… the only one she allowed herself to depend on.”
A softness entered her voice like she was embarrassed to admit the next part.
“She made me feel special,” she said. “Like I was the only person who understood her.”
I didn’t realise I’d been holding my breath until she added:
“And then the isolation started.”
My fingers tightened around my phone.
“Isolation?”
“She convinced me people were talking behind my back. She stirred arguments with my friends and made them look like the aggressors. She read my messages when I wasn’t around. Deleted others. Changed my plans so I’d lose opportunities, all so she could say she was the only one who cared.”
Something deep inside me broke.
“Why did you kick her out?” I asked softly.
Farah hesitated.
Then:
“She impersonated me.”
My entire body went cold.
“She texted my lecturer from my phone while I was asleep,” Farah explained. “Told him I wanted to quit a project. Then she messaged a girl I liked and told her to stop flirting with me.”
My throat felt too small for air.
“She controlled my life through my phone and email because that’s the one thing she never lets you protect, your boundaries and for the longest time, I didn’t suspect her.”
Farah took a slow breath.
“She’s dangerous in a quiet way. You wake up one day and you’re not you anymore.”
The hallway around me blurred.
“She’s living with you now?” Farah asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you need to get out,” she said. “Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now.”
“How did you escape?” I whispered.
Farah’s voice cracked with something that sounded like shame or relief, I couldn’t tell.
“I stopped being afraid of her falling apart,” she said. “That’s her weapon. You fear her emotional collapse more than your own safety.”
The call ended with a quiet warning:
“She doesn’t love you,” Farah said. “She wants to wear your life like a skin.”
The confrontation
I didn’t plan to confront her.
But the moment she woke up and stretched like a cat in my room, something in me snapped.
At first, she froze. Not in fear but in calculation, like she was flipping through a deck of possible reactions.
Then she chose the one Farah warned me about.
She crumbled.
Her shoulders caved in, breath shaking, eyes glistening as tears gathered too quickly to be real.
“You think I would do this to you?” she cried, voice cracking in perfect practiced places.
“I left everything for you! I moved in because I thought you needed me!”
I stood still. My heart hammered but not out of guilt, out of recognition.
This was exactly what Farah described.
“You’re abandoning me,” she whispered, stepping closer.
“Just like she did. Just like everyone does. You’re proving I can’t trust anyone.”
She reached for my hand. I stepped back.
That made her collapse deeper.
She slid to the floor covering her face, sobbing loud enough for the neighbours to hear.
“You don’t understand how hard my life is! I’ve given you everything! Why are you turning on me?”
It would have worked on me months ago.
It would have cracked me open with guilt and confusion.
But now every word she said sounded like a script, one she had performed before.
“Did you send those messages and emails?” I asked quietly.
She didn’t answer.
She only cried harder as if the volume of her pain could drown out the truth sitting between us.
“You’re making me the villain,” she whimpered.
“I thought you loved me. I thought we were the same.”
That was the moment I finally saw her clearly. The shaking hands, the wet cheeks, the trembling voice, everything crafted to pull me back into her orbit.
I didn’t bend.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
Her crying stopped mid breath.
Her face hardened just for a second.
Then she whispered, flat and cold:
“You can’t survive without me.”
I didn’t argue.
I just walked away.
Behind me, her sobbing rose again, louder, more desperate, because losing control was her greatest fear.
And for the first time, I wasn’t under it.
What happens when the villain is still on campus
I wish the story ended there, with her blocked, with me free, with everything neatly outside my life.
But KL isn’t a movie set and Taylor’s University isn’t big enough to erase someone completely.
Hana was still enrolled.
Still in the same school.
Still in the same programme.
Avoiding her on campus felt like trying to avoid humidity in Malaysia, exhausting, impossible and always sticking to your skin when you least expected it.
The first week after I left, I spotted her across the courtyard outside Block E. She was laughing with someone from our tutorial looking like she hadn’t lost a single night of sleep. For a moment, I wondered if she’d already found a new girl to shadow, a new life to slip into.
My hands shook. I almost turned around and went home.
But I didn’t.
Something in me refused to shrink anymore. I needed to reclaim my life back.
It started with a meeting at the Undergraduate Support Office.
I expected them to brush me off or tell me it was “drama between housemates.”
My palms sweated through the entire explanation but I told them everything. Not the full story but enough:
“I don’t feel safe in my programme because someone I used to live with is in all of my classes. I need space or I won’t continue studying.”
The staff member looked at me for a long moment then closed the door gently.
“Is this a welfare issue?” she asked quietly.
“Yes.”
“Is it harassment?”
My voice broke.
“…Yes.”
To my surprise, they didn’t demand the impossible. A proof.
They listened.
They asked what I needed to feel safe.
And then they told me something I didn’t know:
“You’re allowed to request an internal transfer between faculties for safety reasons. It’s rare but it’s possible.”
I walked out of the office with shaking legs and a signed form.
Three weeks later, I was officially transferred from the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences to the School of Media and Communication.
New building.
New lecturers.
New classmates.
A whole new orbit where Hana didn’t exist.
I don’t think I’ve ever breathed so deeply in my life.
Hana had left fingerprints all over my social life.
People avoided me because they thought I was the one sending rude messages.
Some thought I was moody or unstable.
Some thought I was arrogant.
Some thought I just didn’t like them.
It wasn’t easy to look them in the eyes again.
But one by one, I did.
I told them the truth. Not the dramatic version, just the honest one:
“I wasn’t myself for a while because someone manipulated a lot of things around me. I’m trying to rebuild now.”
The surprising part?
Most of them believed me immediately.
Some apologised.
Some sat with me for hours, letting me talk through every detail.
Some told me they had sensed something “off” about Hana but didn’t know how to say it.
For the first time in a year, I felt like my life belonged to me again.
The ending that isn’t neat but is mine
I’m not the same girl who thought KL’s scariest thing was the MRT system.
I learned that danger doesn’t always shout.
Sometimes it compliments your outfit.
Sometimes it studies your habits.
Sometimes it says “We’re the same.”
And sometimes it smiles while replacing you one piece at a time.
But here’s the part that matters:
I closed the door.
I walked away.
I chose myself.
And now, when I see her across campus, I don’t freeze.
I don’t run.
I simply walk past her because she doesn’t get to be the main character in my life anymore.
And somehow in the quiet space she left behind, life had room to return to me.
Adam and I found our way back to each other. Slowly, gently, without anyone standing between us. And I am happy to announce that we’re engaged now and getting married after graduation.
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