The bus ride home was always the worst part. It wasn't the ninety minutes of vibrating metal or the smell of damp upholstery; it was the silence that allowed the noise inside Miko's head to get too loud. She pulled the small, battered keypad phone from her pocket. The plastic was warm, almost feverish, from being clutched in her palm all day. She didn't have anyone to text. She didn't have a life that looked good in photos. She just had the screen.. a small, glowing rectangle that felt like the only thing keeping her from dissolving into the seat.
Miko scrolled through old messages, news she didn't care about, and social feeds that felt like salt in an open wound.
Every happy face she saw was a reminder of a language she didn't speak anymore. She felt like a void trying to decipher human joy. As the bus jolted over a pothole, a thought drifted through her mind, unbidden and cold: "I am an empty shell of a ghost of a person trying to pretend to be a normal human."
By 6:00 PM, she was standing by the front door. The house didn't feel like a home; it felt like a waiting room for a disaster. Upon entering she smelled the air thick with the smell of whatever her mother was cooking, something bitter, something heavy. Miko tried to slip past the kitchen, her footsteps light, hoping to reach the basin before the first strike.
"Miko? Is that you?"
The voice didn't come with a greeting. It came with a weight. Miko stopped, her fingers curled around the tap, turning it on to wash her hands. "Yes, Mom."
"Don't just 'Yes, Mom' me. Look at the state of this hallway. You left your shoes crooked again. You're so lazy, Miko.You take and you take, and you give nothing back. Do you think I'm made of money? Do you think I work all day so you can mope around like a zombie?"
Miko stood there, staring at a crack in the floor. She didn't defend herself. What was the point? The words weren't new. They were a script they had both memorized. She felt the familiar tightening in her chest, the sensation of water rising past her ankles, then her waist. To her mother, she was a disappointment. To herself, she was slowly fading away from the world trying to find a reason to survive just another day.
As Victor Hugo once wrote, "Melancholy is the happiness of being sad," but there was no happiness here. There was only the "Void."
She retreated to her room standing leaning against the wall withher hands trembling by her side from something too close to giving up. She didn't turn on the light.
Miko sat on the edge of the bed and scrolled endlessly through her phone again. The blue light hit her face, and for a second, she saw her reflection in the dark glass. Her eyes looked hollow, devoid of any emotions. She looked like a creature that had lived at the bottom of the ocean for a thousand years.
She started to spiral. It always started with a single question: Why am I even doing this? School, tuition, home, sleep. Repeat. Her mother's shouts from the kitchen continued.
"You have tuition at seven! Don't you dare be late! I'm paying a fortune for those classes!"
Miko looked at the phone. 6:40 PM. Twenty minutes left. She lay back, the phone resting on her chest. It felt heavy, like a lead weight pulling her down through the mattress. She thought about the dog she had fed that morning. She wondered if the animal was still wagging its tail, or if the man had come back to kick it again. Life seemed to be a series of kicks, and Miko was just waiting for the next one.
"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering," Nietzsche said. But what if there is no meaning? What if the suffering is just... there? Like the salt on her skin after the dream. Like the dampness on her pillow from her tears that never quite dries.
The phone buzzed. A low battery warning. 10%. Just like her. Miko was running on a fraction of a soul, plugged into a reality that only wanted more from her. She closed her eyes and for a second, the room vanished. She wasn't in her bed anymore. She was back in the water, the sunlight fading, the silence perfect.
"MIKO! GET OUT HERE NOW!"
The scream shattered the silence. Miko stood up, her joints creaking. She shoved the phone into her pocket, grabbed her bag, and walked toward the door. She had to go to tuition. She had to pretend to learn. She had to keep the mask on for a few more hours.
As she walked down the stairs, she felt a single drop of water hit her hand. A drop of tear had somehow rolled down her cheek landing on top her knuckle, she quickly rubbed her eyes dry with the back of her hand before rushing out of her house gently closing the main door behind as her mother locks it from inside.