Chapter 7 – Adrian's Illness
Adrian woke with the sun burning a square of light across the floor. His body ached as though he'd been running all night, though he hadn't moved from the couch. The letter lay folded on the coffee table, its edges softened from too much handling.
He reached for it before anything else — before brushing his teeth, before food, before even checking if Lucia had texted. Just the letter. He opened it carefully, smoothing the creases with his palm, as if neatness might ward off the chaos pressing in at the edges of his mind.
The chaos never waited long.
It came in whispers, then in a rush. Thoughts that weren't quite thoughts, images that struck with the violence of memory but carried no logic: the glow of fire against glass, the sound of someone's scream swallowed by the wind, his friend's voice cut short.
He scribbled in the nearest notebook, trying to drag the noise into words. The page filled with fragments.
Don't look. Don't sleep. Keep moving. He should have been here. I took his seat. Why me.
Lines crossed out, rewritten, circled. He pressed the pen so hard that the tip tore holes in the paper.
Doctors had told him to breathe, to ground himself. Count five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear. He tried. Some days it worked. Some days it only made the noise louder, mocking his effort.
Lucia didn't know the worst of it. He'd let her see the surface — the restless nights, the mood swings, the way he sometimes disappeared into silence. But not this. Not the notebooks, not the screaming fits into a pillow at three in the morning, not the way his reflection sometimes startled him because he couldn't believe he was still here.
He didn't want to frighten her. He didn't want to be a burden.
That was the cruelest part of the illness: the conviction that he was too much and not enough at the same time. Too broken to lean on anyone, not broken enough to deserve help.
The letter on the table glowed faintly in the sunlight. He stared at it, jaw clenched.
A stranger had written to him. A stranger had used the word invisible. A stranger had said what he had never managed to say aloud.
He opened it again, reread the uneven lines, and felt the words settle somewhere deep, below the noise.
I'm tired of being invisible.
Yes. He was tired too. Tired of surviving without living. Tired of guilt that looped endlessly, years after the fact. Tired of silence.
For the first time in weeks, his hands stilled. The storm hadn't passed, but it paused, like a wild animal startled into stillness.
He closed the letter, folded it with care, and placed it in the drawer of his desk — not buried under bills or notebooks, but alone, resting where he could reach it easily.
Adrian leaned back in his chair, exhaustion sinking deep. He didn't know if he could keep writing. He didn't know if he should.
But he knew one thing: her words had tethered him to the world in a way the pills, the doctors, the routines had failed to.
And so, when night came again, he sharpened his pen and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper. His hands trembled, but he began to write.