There was never a single loud moment when Aashi stopped being here.
It happened the way moss grows on the north side of a wall—slowly, quietly, inevitably.
At first it was only small refusals.
She would sit at the dining table listening to her mother list chores and feel the sentence slide off her like rain on waxed paper. The words reached her ears but never really landed inside her chest. She nodded anyway. The nod still worked.
By sixteen the nods were automatic, but the part that used to live behind her eyes had begun drifting backward, like someone slowly backing out of a room while pretending they're still listening.
She discovered she could walk through entire afternoons without once arriving in them.