My chest ached constantly—a deep, crushing pressure that made every breath feel like work. My limbs felt heavy and distant, like they belonged to someone else. Sometimes my hands tingled. Sometimes my feet went numb.
I didn’t care. This didn’t feel dramatic like some childish outburst. It felt like gravity had won.
Days blurred together. Weeks had past before I realized. I didn’t leave my bed unless it was to use the bathroom and that was starting to feel like too much effort. My body was weak. My heart barely beat. Each minute that passed was futile. But my soul was a withered, brittle thing that was clinging by a thread.
The first time I called Anthony, he answered after the first ring but remained silent. I couldn’t even hear him breathing, but I felt him. His presence soothed some of my jagged edges, only to shred me once more when he hung up.
The next call a few days later rang twice before I was sent to voicemail. All it recorded were my hiccuping sobs and haunted cries before it timed out and cut me off.
Eventually I stopped calling him. Stopped trying to bridge the gap between us that was now bigger than the Mariana Trench. It was just an empty dark cavernous space where hope once lived. Because hearing the silence hurt more than not trying at all. His rejection slowly poisoned me. I’d texted my dad once, letting him know what had transpired while he was gone, but he never even read the message.
It was just more proof that I didn’t exist anymore.
By the endof the first month, the pain hadn’t faded. It had settled into me.
It wasn’t the kind of settling that brought peace. It felt more like something heavy finding its place and refusing to move. The initial shock had burned itself out early, leaving behind something dull and constant. It didn’t spike anymore. It pressed.
The quiet stopped feeling loud and started feeling normal. My ears adjusted to it. The house didn’t echo the way it hadat first. It absorbed sound instead. Mornings passed without footsteps on the stairs. Even my own breathing felt smaller, like the walls were slowly learning how to ignore me.
I stopped opening the blinds. Not because I made a decision about it, but because it stopped occurring to me that I should. Light felt intrusive when it leaked in anyway. It made my eyes ache and my head pound, so I pulled the blanket over my face and waited for it to pass. No one knocked. No one reminded me to get up.
Sleep came in fragments. I never felt rested. I would get an hour, maybe two if my body gave in completely, and then I would surface again, disoriented, my heart racing. For a brief moment—sometimes barely a second—I would forget. I would reach into the empty space beside me or listen for movement in the house, my chest already loosening in anticipation.
Then the truth would settle back in. The space stayed empty. The house stayed still.
It never felt sharp. It felt blunt. Like something solid landing in my chest and knocking the air out of me. My body reacted before my mind did, folding inward without thought. My shoulders rounded. My spine curved. It felt instinctive, like shrinking might make it easier to endure.
I stayed curled up like that most of the time. My jaw stayed clenched. My hands stayed fisted in the sheets until my fingers went numb. I stopped expecting the bed to shift. I stopped listening for the sound of someone breathing nearby.
The pain in my chest never left. It wasn’t dramatic or sudden. It was constant. A deep pressure that made every breath feel like effort. It felt like something heavy had been placed inside me and forgotten there. Some nights I pressed my palm to my sternum and waited for it to ease, the way it used to when someone noticed.
Sometimes my heart raced without warning. Other times it felt distant and sluggish, like it might lose its rhythm if I didn’t pay attention to it. There was no one there to tell me to slow down. No one there to tell me I was okay.
I only left the bed to use the bathroom. Even that felt difficult. Standing made my head swim, and my legs shook like they were no longer sure how to hold me. I avoided the mirror. I didn’t want to see how much space I took up now, or how little. I didn’t want to see how obvious it was that no one had been watching over me.
Wanting anything started to feel embarrassing.
Hunger came and went without urgency. Thirst registered as discomfort, nothing more. I ignored both. Desire didn’t exist anymore. What was left felt closer to shame. I learned how to flatten myself around it and keep still, the way you do when you don’t expect to be noticed.
By the end of the month, the pain had become background noise.
It wasn’t gone. It was just constant. A low presence under everything else that I stopped questioning. I didn’t fight it anymore. I didn’t try to understand it. I simply existed inside it, waiting for something to change, or for me to disappear quietly enough that no one would notice.
The rattlingsound of my phone vibrating against the mattress near my hand pulled at me briefly. I didn’t reach for it. I didn’t turn my head. It stopped on its own, like everything else eventually did.
Time passed. Or it didn’t. My sense of it had dissolved. Light shifted faintly on the wall. My mouth felt dry. My body sent signals I barely registered. Everything arrived muted, delayed—like my system had learned there was no point asking anymore.
A sound drifted up from downstairs. It barely registered at first. Then it came again—louder. Insistent. Urgent. It echoed through the house in a way that felt invasive, like hands pressing inside my skull.
“Elliot!” Mia’s voice carried up the stairs, already tight with fear. “Please. Just open the door.”
I stayed still.
My limbs felt weighted. My chest compressed with every shallow breath. My heart stumbled between too slow and too fast. I stared at the same patch of wall I’d been staring at for days, eyes burning but unfocused.
The knocking turned into pounding. Something cracked. Wood splintered. Then—silence. A breath slipped out of me, thin and exhausted. My eyes fell closed.
The door gave way with a crash that shook the house. It reverberated through my head like a gunshot. My body jerked despite itself, heart slamming painfully against my ribs.
