Adrian's phone doesn't just light up anymore it startles him.
Every vibration feels like a hand on his shoulder when he doesn't want to be touched.
Every notification feels like someone tugging on the last thin thread holding him to the world.
He turns the phone face-down, then eventually silences it, then eventually powers it off not out of defiance, but out of fear that he'll see another reminder of people he's failing without even doing anything.
The messages pile up like snowdrifts he's too weak to wade through.
Birthdays he forgot.
Appointments he missed.
Friends asking if he's okay, then asking again with more concern, then asking less, the worry thinning out into helplessness.
His mother still calls.
Even when he doesn't.
Five times a day becomes six, then eight.
Her persistence should reassure him, but instead it sharpens the guilt into something cold and metallic in his ribs. He imagines her pacing by the window, glancing at her phone, rehearsing conversations she'll never get to have with him.
He lets it ring anyway.
The apartment seems to sense the shift in him.
It stops feeling like a home and starts feeling like a padded cell made of unspoken fears. The air grows stale, heavy with the scent of old laundry and unopened food containers. The fridge hums like a lonely machine trying to keep something alive in a place where everything else has stopped trying.
He moves less.
Speaks less.
Thinks less but hurts more.
Days lose their edges. Nights bleed into mornings without him noticing. The curtains stay drawn because sunlight feels like a spotlight he doesn't deserve to stand in. The world outside becomes mythological, too distant to believe in.
Sometimes he hears people outside laughing and it feels unreal, like ghosts visiting a place he no longer belongs to.
He stops showering because the process feels impossible: the turning of knobs, the sensation of water on his skin, the confrontation with his reflection. The mirror has become an enemy, a reminder of the version of Adrian who used to smile without effort, who used to make plans, who used to exist.
He avoids that man.
He avoids his own eyes.
Meals turn into something abstract ideas more than actions. Hunger comes and goes like a faint knock on a door he refuses to open. He lives off crackers, then off nothing. Time becomes a hallway with no windows and no clocks.
Some days he wakes up already exhausted.
Other days he doesn't remember falling asleep.
His thoughts begin to warp, slow and thick like syrup. He stares at the TV screen on standby, watching his own dim reflection in the black glass, wondering when he stopped being a person and became a shape.
Then comes the quiet.
Not peaceful quiet.
A dense quiet, the kind that presses against his ears until he can hear the faint pulse in his own neck. A quiet so heavy it feels like air trying to bury him.
Night amplifies it.
In the darkness, thoughts he avoids during the day unfold themselves, stretching out like shadows cast by a lantern he can't turn off. He lies there, paralyzed by the ache inside him, by the weight of a future he can't picture and a past he can't bear to revisit.
And then the whisper returns.
Not dramatic.
Not violent.
Just… familiar.
A dark thought, soft around the edges, inviting him to imagine a world where he is no longer a burden a world where people don't worry, where he no longer disappoints, where the ache inside him finally unclenches.
He hates the thought.
He fears it more than anything.
But it's gentle in a way nothing else in his life is right now.
And that softness dangerous, quiet, patient wraps around his exhaustion like arms pulling him down into deeper water.
Some nights, he feels himself drifting toward the pull.
Not because he wants to leave.
But because he's so unbearably tired of staying.
He wonders if absence can become a kind of presence if his disappearance would echo less loudly than his existence does.
He imagines the world without him and feels both terrified and relieved.
He imagines breathing out and not needing to breathe in again.
He imagines silence that doesn't hurt.
The thought waits.
Not forcing.
Just circling, like a quiet current beneath his ribs, deepening the isolation until it becomes something almost cavernous inside him.
And as Adrian sinks further into himself, he starts to believe that maybe the world has already begun learning how to continue without him.
Maybe he's already gone in every way except the one that counts.
Maybe the last piece of him holding on is the part begging for someone anyone to notice how far he's fallen.