Baby, I’m starting to get worried.
*missed call from Aleksandr*
Please tell me you’re all right.
Eva.
*missed call from Aleksandr*
*missed call from Aleksandr*
*missed call from Aleksandr*
There wasa moment somewhere between when I stood at my counter, my hand poised to apply my mascara, and when I fell to my bathroom floor. And that moment was when I realized I no longer felt like a person. Like I was a space where a person had once been.
The apartment was still.Toostill.
The kind that presses in on you, making you hyperaware of your own existence and yet completely unsure if you’re actually here or if you’re just watching yourself move. I knew my body was doing things—breathing, blinking, existing—but I wasn’t attached to it anymore. I was observing it from far away, like it belonged to someone else who had left the room and forgotten to come back.
My phone lay on the counter, and I knew I should have called someone. My therapist. My brother. Mia. Charlotte, who I knewdealt with mental health issues of her own and would probably never judge me in the least. Maybe I should have called Alek.
But I couldn’t bring myself to touch the cursed device.
A terrible, heavy certainty settled itself deep in my stomach. I was a black hole of pain and suffering, of feeling unsure of when the universe’s punishments would drop on me. Anyone I’d ever loved would suffer from knowing me, from being pulled into the gravity of a beast that slowly fed on me. It was better to let myself succumb to the void than to drag them there with me.
I thought I was getting better. God, I thought this feeling would begone.Medication, therapy, getting my dream role—all of that was supposed to actually help me. My life was improving with each day, and I thought my illness was too.
Clearly I was wrong.
I could feel Death hovering behind my shoulders, its fingers grazing the backs of my arms, settling into my skin, waiting for me to do something wrong. And everything was wrong. Every choice. Every movement. Every thought. My existence felt like a trigger.
My throat tightened, my body carving a space in itself for the fear to live and grow. I couldn’t tell if my heart was racing because I was anxious or because something was genuinely wrong with me—if this attack would be the one to finally kill me.
I pressed my forehead to the cool tile floor, wrapping my arms around myself while my thoughts blurred into each other, stacking and looping, folding inward like a collapsing star.
What if I was violent and didn’t know it?
What if I was going to hurt someone I loved?
What if my thoughts meant something about who I really was?
What if this wasn’t illness at all? What if this was me?
That was the cruelest part. The not knowing. The constant interrogation. Which thoughts were mine? Which ones wereintruders wearing my voice? Where did I end, and the sickness begin?
I counted the tiles on the floor. The cracks in the ceiling. The hitches in my breath. Not to calm myself, but because if I didn’t, I knew something bad might happen.
One… Two… Three…
Wrong. Again.
One… Two… Three… Four…
Wrong. Alwayswrong.
The void crept in slowly, thick and suffocating. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t violent. Yet it swallowed me alive until only the emptiness inside of me echoed. Like if I leaned into it just a little more, I might disappear completely.
My thoughts circled endlessly, chewing on themselves, my mind consumed by a relentless wave of anxiety that had no clear shape and no exit. I was imprisoned, judged by my own soul, sentenced without a trial. I kneeled inside of myself and confessed to crimes I didn’t commit, my mind a weapon I couldn’t disarm.
