It began with a thought. Just one. A whisper buried in the static of his mind, soft enough to ignore, yet sharp enough to leave a scar. Why are you like this? Eru lay still on his bed, unmoving, his eyes open but unfocused. The ceiling hovered above him like a weight, closer than it used to be. The curtains had not been drawn in days, and the light had long since vanished from the room. Maybe the sun still rose. Maybe it didn’t. He didn’t know anymore.
He didn’t sleep. Not because his body wasn’t exhausted, but because every time he closed his eyes, the silence would shatter. Thoughts screamed at him in a language made of regrets. At first, he called it overthinking. He told himself it was common, that everyone gets stuck in loops now and then. But his weren’t loops. They were traps. Thoughts spun like blades, slicing through every memory, every spoken word, every decision he could no longer change. They spun tighter and faster, until even breathing felt like a question without an answer.
He tried to fight it, to distract himself with anything as music, books, meaningless scrolling through pixels and empty words. But no sound could reach him. The silence inside him was louder than the world outside. Days faded into each other, or maybe they weren’t days at all. His phone lit up from time to time with names he used to care about, but he no longer had the energy to pretend. Someone knocked on the door once. Maybe twice. But the door stayed closed. The room, dim and still, became more than just four walls. It became a boundary between him and a world he no longer knew how to belong to.
Then came the rain. Not the violent kind. It was soft, like fingertips tapping on the glass and almost comforting. And as he listened, something inside him shifted. He noticed the absence of fear. The absence of sadness. The absence of anything. It wasn’t peace. It was numbness. Cold and quiet and endless. Like something had reached into his chest and taken what made him human. He wasn’t breaking anymore. He was already broken.
That was the moment he understood. He was sick. But not in a way anyone could see. It wasn’t bleeding or coughing or something a pill could fix. It was something hidden, something slow. Like a crack beneath ice, spreading silently, until everything gave way.
Depression didn’t arrive with warning. It seeped in, day by day, until it became all there was. He whispered something then. A voice so faint, even the room barely noticed. I think I’m disappearing. No one heard it…not even him.
It was a day like all the others. Silent, stale, and heavy. The kind of day where the walls felt too close and the ceiling too low, as if the room itself was collapsing inward with him trapped inside. Eru had been lying on his bed for hours, staring blankly at the ceiling fan as it spun lazily above him. His body existed, but his mind was buried somewhere else, somewhere darker. That’s when he reached for his old phone, not to connect with anyone, not to feel, but simply to escape the noise inside his head with something, anything.
He didn’t expect to find it. The photo. It was taken years ago, back when he still had light in his eyes, before the days began bleeding into one another. In the picture, he was smiling genuinely. Not for anyone’s approval, not to hide anything. Just smiling. Carefree. Alive. There was someone else in the frame too, blurred by time, but clearly important. A friend? A sibling? He couldn’t even remember the name. But the warmth in that single captured moment struck him harder than he thought possible. He dropped the phone, and for the first time in months, he felt something that wasn’t numbness. He felt loss.
The pain came suddenly, like a flood breaking through a dam. His chest tightened, his breathing turned ragged, and the thoughts, those relentless thoughts, returned with cruel precision. You’ve lost him. You killed the person in that photo. You’re just a hollow thing now. He curled up, arms around himself like a shield, but it did nothing to stop the collapse inside. He cried. No sound, no tears. Just a deep, inward shattering. But in that collapse, something else surfaced. Not strength. Not hope. Just a question.
If I miss that person… does that mean he’s still inside me?
He didn’t have the answer. Not yet. But that question stayed with him. Even as the hours passed and the room grew colder. Even as his body screamed for him to give up. The thought lingered, quiet but stubborn. Maybe he wasn’t just broken. Maybe he was grieving the version of himself he left behind. And if that was true, maybe it wasn’t too late to reach for him again.
Eru sat up slightly, his back against the wall, his eyes still red from the storm. He didn’t say anything grand, didn’t make a vow. He just whispered a small sentence into the dark. I don’t know how to be okay yet… but I want to try. It was barely audible, but it was real. And for someone like him, someone who had been numb for so long, that quiet desire to heal was a beginning.