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The flat was quiet.
Too quiet.
Dan could hear his blood thudding in his ears like a drumbeat and when he turned on the TV for some background noise it sounded tinny and inappropriate. He put away the cutlery that had been waiting in the dishwasher for days and the clinking made his teeth clench. The sounds from the street outside felt invasive and too close. There was a shaking in his fingers that came and went.
He hadn’t opened a window in days.
Dan was sure he could hear his heartbeats reverberating around the rooms, bouncing off the cream walls and down the hallway. He walked on his tiptoes in the darkness and avoided the creaky spots on the floor because they made his bones ache. The purple shadows under his eyes grew more prominent, his skin looked grey as the skies outside. When he stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, he struggled to recognise the person staring back at him.
Dan woke up alone and stared blankly up at the ceiling. The bedsheets were half-hanging off the bed because he’d spent the night tossing and turning and flitting between nightmares and awareness. More than once he’d jerked awake, casting his eyes wildly around the room because he was sure he had heard something or someone. There was a layer of dust on the books stacked up on his bedside table. An empty mug sat on the floor, abandoned there days ago.
He turned over and allowed sleep to claim him once more.
His alarm went off for the third time and he snoozed it again. Burrowed back under the blankets, blocked out his vision with a pillow.
The quiet it left behind put his teeth on edge.
He hadn’t wanted to see anyone for days.
Or was it weeks?
Friends would call and he would dread their careful questions and the looming danger of them inviting him to places. And it wasn’t anything that he could explain to himself because wasn’t the problem that he was alone? But people would call, and a heavy sickness would settle in his stomach, and his hands would tremble.
Dan watched the phone ring and ring and chewed his fingernails down to the quick.
Management sent him an email and he ignored it.
He couldn’t recall the last time he’d opened Instagram.
There was nothing to share.
His eating habits went completely down the drain.
Dan stopped eating regular meals and just ate at random hours of the day and night, whenever his vision went black when he stood up. Whenever he’d look down at his fingers and they’d be trembling, whenever his legs felt too unsteady to hold him upright. The plates and glasses stayed on the floor, the table, the countertops. Perched on windowsills and concealed behind the sofa like dirty secrets.
He hadn’t run the dishwasher in days. There were butter knives in the sink and towers of mugs on the drying rack.
And then there were no plates in the cupboard anymore and Dan didn’t care. He also didn’t care that the food in the cupboards was running out.
He didn’t seem to care about anything anymore. Nothing mattered.
Personhood felt distant and Dan felt as though he was watching himself from afar. Like he’d left his body far behind, but it was still dragging him through the motions.
Dan stopped opening the curtains.
He stopped getting out of bed for days at a time. At night he would wander aimlessly through the rooms when sleep eluded him.
What was the point?
His phone rang every few hours and he ignored it. He watched the number of emails on his phone stack up and felt numb. Some days he would drag himself over to the keyboard set up in the dark living room and wait for inspiration that no longer seemed to come and then he’d have panic attacks because what if he was never able to write another song?
Pages stayed blank and there were no new voice memos on his phone.
Dan hadn’t listened to any music for weeks. Days?
His phone rang again, and he rolled over and pulled the covers more tightly around himself. But it kept ringing, and the sound was so horribly incessant that he sat up and answered just to stop it from making his head pound even more than it already was.
“Hey,” Kyle said brightly down the phone, cheerful as yellow sunlight in July.
Dan winced.
“Hey,” he replied, hoping his voice wouldn’t betray the fact it was the first time he’d spoken aloud in days. Weeks? Dan no longer had any concept of time. His watch was in the living room, or was it the bathroom? Had he forgotten it in that venue in Portugal? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
“I haven’t heard from you for a while,” he said. There were sounds in the background, like Kyle had the phone tucked between his shoulder and ear while doing something else. “Mark said you’ve not been at the studio.”
There was an unspoken question there and Dan considered just saying it. Letting it all spill out and to hell with the consequences. It was Kyle, he thought to himself. There was nothing he could do that would shock Kyle. They had toured together far too long for that.
But how do you tell someone that nothing matters and that your life has shrunk enough that you’re scared to even open the front door? How do you explain that you can’t write songs anymore?
He panicked. Swallowed. Tried to sound normal and not like he’d spent the night pacing the hallway unable to breathe, hands clasped around his middle because his stomach had been aching for days and he couldn’t tell if it was the sporadic eating or the anxiety.
“I’ve been a bit ill, so I’ve just been working on demos at home,” he said. Pushed his hair back from his forehead. Pulled at his shirt.
“What did you have?” Kyle asked curiously. The muffled sound of a door closing.
“Flu, I think.” Dan said. Lies. So many lies. One day he’d lose track of every last one.
He watched a drop of water meander its way slowly down his window. It was too cold and he couldn’t summon up the energy to turn on the heating. Of course it would rain while he was finally crashing and burning like everyone had long predicted he would. Hadn’t they had a manager once who had told Dan one night that he was a train wreck waiting to happen? Hadn’t a friend from uni, way back when, threatened to call his parents after Dan hadn’t left their student accommodation or his room in two weeks? Hadn’t he been told, so many times that he’d lost count, that he should try medication and he’d refused because he didn’t want labels placed on him?
Well, at least Dan was finally fulfilling some expectations.
If nothing else, he could fall off the edge with the best of them.
“Are you feeling better now?” Kyle asked and Dan lurched back to the present. Pulled at his T shirt and wondered when he’d last changed it. He could hear the concern colouring Kyle’s voice and it sounded like tour buses at midnight and studios they felt way too insignificant to be in. It made him feel even emptier.
“Yeah, loads,” he lied. Ran his cold fingers over the creased sheets and wanted to sink down into nothingness again. His bones felt heavy.
“So, you’ll head down to the studio soon?” Kyle asked. “Mark was wondering where you had got to, and he said he couldn’t reach you. I wanted to come down as well, work on the synths we talked about?”
Another unspoken question.
“Sorry,” Dan said. “This flu thing really knocked me out.”
Sidestep.
Silence.
Coward.
“Right. Well, better go then,” Kyle said. “I’m heading out to dinner with Kate in a bit.”
Dan nodded, then remembered that Kyle couldn’t see him. His thoughts either raced or got trapped. All or nothing. A switch turned to on or off.
“No problem,” he said hollowly.
“If you need anything just give me a shout, yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said. Then he hung up.
Dan looked around the room. He hadn’t opened the curtains and the air smelled stale. Dan ran a hand through his hair again and realised he hadn’t showered in days. Couldn’t find it in himself to care. He got up slowly, painfully, floor icy beneath his bare feet, and wandered to the living room. Lay down on the sofa and dozed, drifting aimlessly through the confusing state between waking and sleep, watching the light in the room change as the streetlights turned on outside. Shadows warped and twisted on the floor, his upstairs neighbour walking around and making the ceiling creak. Cars drove down the street, along his windowsill and into his head. There was a wind blowing through the glasses and plates in the kitchen and a thousand lights flickering beneath his eyelids.
The next afternoon Dan considered going down the street to the supermarket. Then decided against it. He didn’t want to leave the flat. There was no energy in him anymore.
Dan burrowed back down into the blankets.
He hadn’t eaten today and his stomach hurt.
All he wanted was for everything to stop. Maybe permanently.
There was a knock at his front door just as his daily panic attack reached its ugly peak.
Dan froze mid pace in the middle of the dark living room, hands knotted tightly in his hair, fingernails digging into his scalp and tears still flowing freely down his face. He sobbed desperately to himself, hoping whoever it was would fuck off again and just leave him alone.
The knock came again, then a loud rattle. A familiar voice came through the letterbox.
“Dan?”
Shit.
“Dan, if you don’t open the door, I’m going to call someone who can take it off its hinges.”
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Dan anxiously chewed on his numb fingers and frantically weighed up his options. None of them ended with him being left alone to quietly cease to be in peace.
He shakily stepped over the mugs and various dirty plates scattered on the floor and staggered to the front door. His breaths were rasping in his throat and his lungs were refusing to properly fill. He felt lightheaded and couldn’t tell if it was from oxygen deprivation or lack of food. Everything had been hazy for days.
“Dan, I know you’re in there. Please don’t make me do this.”
Dan stared at the door for a few minutes, trying to calm his breathing to something resembling normal. The white paint was peeling from one of the corners and he concentrated on that. Then he opened the door.
Kyle was bundled up in a bright orange coat, knitted scarf and boots. He looked rested, healthy. Like someone who had just come back from a long, well-deserved holiday.
And he was looking at Dan with a horrified expression.
“Hey?” he said, and it sounded like a question. His dark eyes raked over Dan’s appearance and there was a crease growing deeper and deeper between his dark eyebrows. It was an expression Dan knew far too well.
Dan looked down at himself and felt a sliver of shame settle under his skin. He hadn’t changed his clothes in days. He wasn’t wearing socks or shoes. There were tears running down his cheeks and his breathing sounded obnoxiously loud and unsteady in the quiet of the stairwell.
He suddenly found himself being pulled into a tight hug, arms trapped between their chests and face pressed into Kyle’s shoulder. Dan held himself stiffly, unable to relax into the hug.
“Dan, why didn’t you call?” Kyle murmured into his shoulder and Dan felt the lump in his throat grow larger. Because I didn’t want to bother anyone, he wanted to say. Because I’m thirty years old and I should know how to deal with my shit by now.
“Can I come in?” Kyle asked, pulling back and peering at Dan’s face. Dan wiped a hand roughly across his eyes, but it felt like too little too late. Like putting up a danger sign after an accident had already occurred.
He nodded. The floor was cold under his bare feet.
Kyle softly closed the door behind them.
Dan was suddenly painfully aware of everything. The darkness, the stale air, the dishes scattered all over the place, the fact that he had quite obviously been sleeping on the sofa. The silence settled around them like a thick snow.
“Sorry,” Dan whispered hoarsely, and he hated that his voice was still shaking.
“Jesus, Dan,” Kyle exhaled, peering around the shadowy space in horror. “When was the last time you went outside?”
“I don’t know,” Dan whispered. “I don’t remember.”
“Ate something?”
“Yesterday? The day before?”
Kyle rubbed a hand over his face and exhaled again, louder this time. The weary sound pierced the muffled emptiness of the flat and Dan fought the urge to cry right there and then.
“Right,” Kyle began, walking towards the sofa and stopping in the middle of the room. He trailed off.
Dan felt the shame crawling all over his skin like ants. He pulled a heavy hand through his hair before tugging nervously on his shirt.
“Right,” Kyle repeated, turning in a slow circle and taking everything in. “Right.”
“I’m sorry,” Dan repeated helplessly. He felt as though he was shrinking and shrinking down into dust.
“Don’t apologise, it’s alright,” Kyle said quickly. Too quickly. He was looking at the blankets that were haphazardly scattered on the sofa and floor in front of it.
“Why don’t you go take a shower,” he suggested, running his hand over his moustache. “And I’ll…”
He trailed off again helplessly. Dan suddenly realised that Kyle felt as out of his depth as he did.
“Dammit Dan, why didn’t you just call?” Kyle said quietly. There was no malice or judgement in his tone, but Dan cringed from it anyway.
“I’m sorry.”
He didn’t know what else to say. His mind had gone blank, auto-pilot.
“Do you want to come stay with me for a few days?” Kyle asked softly and ever so gently. “Just until we work all this out?”
He gestured vaguely around the flat, then at Dan.
Dan didn’t answer. There were hot tears pricking at the corners of his eyes again and he didn’t trust his voice. He hated this. He hated that Kyle had to see him like this. He hated all of it.
Kyle misinterpreted his silence.
“Or maybe I can come stay with you for a day or two?” he asked. He rubbed his hands together. The flat was freezing. It was January and it had been ages since the heating had been on.
“I’ll come with you,” Dan managed to choke out around the lump in his throat. He didn’t want Kyle to be in the flat. He didn’t want Kyle to see anything else.
Kyle pulled him into another tight hug.
“We’ll fix this, mate, we’ll fix this,” Kyle said soothingly, the words vibrating against the side of his head. The optimism sounded empty.
Dan hated that he didn’t manage to feel any better at those words. He hated that the hollowness in his chest felt more oppressive than ever.
He hated that this state felt so permanent.