The storm grows heavier as the hours pass, the rain turning from a steady hiss into a violent drumming, like fingers pounding on the roof demanding to be let in. Wind howls through the narrow gaps of the apartment windows, a low, animal sound that makes the whole building feel alive and angry.
Adrian doesn't turn on any lights mostly because the power is already unstable, but also because darkness feels easier to exist in. It doesn't expect anything from him. It doesn't reflect anything back.
He sits on the floor with his back sagging against the couch, legs pulled close to his chest, arms wrapped around them loosely. His stomach is a hollow ache, but even hunger feels far away, like a sensation belonging to someone else.
The room smells faintly of damp clothes and stale air.
The storm's pressure makes the walls seem closer than usual.
When the power cuts out for good, the sudden absence of the refrigerator's hum and the overhead lights' faint buzz leaves him in a silence so complete it feels like the world is holding its breath.
For a moment, he holds his breath too.
Then he exhales shakily, his breath fogging the darkness in front of him.
The stack of unsent letters lies where he left them creased, smudged, some pages rippled from old tears. They are apologies in various stages of despair. Promises he knows he can't keep. Half-formed explanations of feelings he never learned to articulate out loud.
One letter begins with
I'm sorry I became something you had to worry about.
Another:
I don't know what happened to me. I wish I did.
Another:
I'm trying. I promise I'm trying. I just don't know how much longer I can.
He spreads them across the floor, pages overlapping like wings belonging to a fallen creature.
When he tries to read them, the words seem foreign, disjointed like someone else wrote them, someone more articulate, more desperate, more broken. Each letter feels like a breadcrumb leading him back through a forest he's been lost in for too long.
A forest with no exit.
A forest where the trees whisper his failures.
His hands tremble as he picks up one page. It's dated months ago. Before he stopped answering calls. Before he lost his job. Before he stopped recognizing himself in the mirror.
Back when he was still fighting.
Lightning tears across the sky, flooding the room with blue-white brightness. The thunder that follows is so loud it rattles the floorboards and seems to strike straight through his chest.
He flinches so hard the paper slips from his hand.
His breath comes uneven now, chest tightening not panic exactly, but something close, something jagged. He feels like he's being squeezed from the inside, like his ribs are shrinking around everything he's been holding in.
And then the tears come.
Not the kind that burst out.
The kind that seep slow, tired, hopeless.
They trail silently down his face, falling onto the letters like raindrops inside the room.
He wipes at his eyes weakly, then gives up.
Because what's the point? The tears want to fall. And he's too exhausted to fight anything anymore, even himself.
He realizes, with a sudden clarity that chills him, that he is afraid not of the storm, not of the dark, but of the emptiness settling into him like a permanent tenant.
He's afraid of how easy it feels to keep sinking.
Afraid of the way the thought of disappearance has softened, become familiar like a door he passes every day, wondering when he'll stop resisting the urge to open it.
A low rumble of thunder rolls through him, vibrating the air.
He whispers into the dark, barely audible over the storm:
"I can't do this… I can't keep going like this…"
His voice cracks on the last word.
It doesn't echo.
It doesn't carry.
It just dissolves into the air, swallowed whole by the sound of rain hammering the world outside.
And for the first time, Adrian understands a new kind of loneliness the kind where even he can't hear himself anymore, where his own voice sounds distant, like someone calling to him from under deep water.
No one hears him.
No one knows.
No one is coming.
Not yet.
And in that terrifying, silent truth, something inside him slips another inch downward deeper into the dark water where thoughts move slowly, where hope is muffled, where the storm outside feels less dangerous than the one inside his chest.