(The Stillness)
He wakes up without any particular reason to stay awake.
There is no alarm. No urgency. His eyes open because his body has learned that sleep eventually ends whether he wants it to or not. The ceiling above him is familiar in the way a stranger's face becomes familiar after seeing it every day on the bus. He knows the cracks, the faint discoloration near the corner, the way the light hits it differently depending on the hour. None of it means anything.
The room smells stale. Clothes are scattered across the floor, some clean, some not. The bed looks like it lost a fight. He doesn't remember making it this way, but he doesn't remember making it any other way either.
He lies still for a while, staring, not thinking.
People imagine numbness as calm. As emptiness. As peace.
It isn't.
It's static. It's a constant low-frequency noise that never fully becomes a thought. It's knowing that something inside you is supposed to react and watching it fail, over and over, until you stop waiting for it.
Eventually, his body moves.
Not because he wants to get up, but because staying still too long starts to feel like decay. He swings his legs over the side of the bed and sits there, elbows on knees, spine curved forward as if he's already bracing himself for impact.
The mirror across the room catches him in its periphery. Messy hair, eyes dulled into something flat and unreflective. He looks unfinished. Like someone stopped paying attention halfway through making him.
He doesn't fix anything.
Caring requires energy. Energy requires purpose. He has neither.
He pulls on whatever clothes are closest, doesn't bother checking if they match. The wind outside pushes his hair further out of place when he steps out of the house. He lets it. It feels honest.
On the walk to school, his thoughts overlap without forming anything complete. Memories flicker and disappear before he can examine them. Images without context. Feelings without names.
Chaos, but quiet.
At school, people treat him like he exists.
Someone claps him on the shoulder. Someone complains about a test. Someone laughs too loudly. He responds where expected. He times his smiles well enough that no one notices the delay between stimulus and reaction.
He has learned how to perform normal.
Being around people is not enjoyable, but it is preferable. Alone, the silence becomes too loud. Around others, the noise outside drowns out the noise inside.
From the outside, he is unremarkable. A little careless. A little quiet. Nothing concerning. Nothing broken enough to draw attention.
Just a boy.
Inside, he is already hollow.
His father died when he was three.
People phrase it gently, as if softness changes reality. Passed away. Lost him. Gone too soon. He does not remember the man's face clearly, only fragments. A voice he can't recreate. Arms he knows existed because someone told him they did.
What he remembers is absence.
He remembers asking for someone who did not answer. He remembers rooms that felt too large afterward. He remembers his mother's voice changing permanently, tightening around certain words.
He grew up knowing something fundamental had been removed, like a load-bearing wall no one bothered to replace.
His stepfather arrived later, when he was old enough to understand hope.
That man stayed long enough to become routine. Long enough to be called family. Long enough to make promises without realizing the damage they would cause if broken.
When he was nine, that man left.
No dramatic fight. No explanation tailored for a child. Just a gradual disappearance that solidified into permanence. Love, it turned out, was optional. Staying was a choice people could revoke.
After that, he stopped assuming anyone was permanent.
His mother did her best in the ways she knew how. She worked. She provided. She survived. What she did not do was look too closely at him. Grief took up most of the space in the house, and children learned early not to compete with it.
He learned to be quiet. To need less. To disappear politely.
By thirteen, exhaustion had replaced sadness entirely.
That was the year the world narrowed into something small and unbearable. The year mornings felt heavier than nights. The year he realized he could go entire days without feeling anything at all and that terrified him more than pain ever had.
The attempt was not dramatic.
There was no screaming, no breakdown, no cinematic last thoughts. Just a calm, terrifying clarity. A sense that continuing required effort he no longer possessed. That stopping might be easier.
He did not want to die.
He just did not want to exist like this anymore.
He remembers the ceiling again. Different this time. Hospital white. He remembers his mother crying afterward, not during. He remembers adults calling him brave, calling it a mistake, calling it a miracle.
He remembers thinking that none of them were listening.
Survival did not feel like a gift.
It felt like a delay.
After that, numbness settled in properly. Thick. Protective. A layer between him and everything sharp. It made life manageable. It made disappointment survivable. It made loss tolerable.
He learned to function inside it.
Years passed like that. Days stacked on days without distinction. He grew older. Taller. Quieter.
Then she arrived.
She did not announce herself as anything important. She didn't storm into his life with purpose. She just… stayed. Sat beside him. Talked when he felt like listening. Stayed quiet when he didn't.
Her laughter reached him in ways nothing else did. It slipped through the cracks numbness hadn't sealed completely. With her, something inside him stirred, faint but unmistakable.
Warmth.
It frightened him how much he needed it.
She became his anchor without ever asking to be one. His one source of color in a world flattened into grayscale. He found himself waiting for her presence, orienting his days around it.
She made him feel alive again.
And because of that, he became afraid.
End of Part I