Chapter Text
To say being alone was frightening is an understatement. It was a void that gnawed at your insides. It clawed at your throat, wound tight around your lungs, and pooled in the very pit of your belly. No voices to answer your calls. No warm assurance to cradle your spiraling thoughts. Just the unrelenting silence, broken only by your mind conjuring vivid, haunting images—fabricated yet cruelly believable—that made the isolation feel even more suffocating, and ironically, much more alive.
Your mindscape, at its cruelest, drew out shapes from the shadows. More vivid than reality. Your beloved, however, wasn't there. He hadn't just vanished. He dissolved. The space you desperately wished he'd take up was nothing more than a phantom. And nobody noticed. Nobody cared. All they did was look at you in disdain as you begged for answers.
‘Crazy,’ they mouthed, their voices barely a whisper yet cutting through the air like knives. The dream didn't just show you loneliness—it dragged you into its depths and held you there, a captive to a horror too monstrous to wake from.
You had such a dream right now. You had just escaped the clutches of that abyss with a jolt to your system. One good look at your surroundings and you realized nothing had changed in the few hours you were asleep. Even if you knew your beloved hadn't disappeared, your mind wouldn't let you fully believe it. You had to sate your anxious thoughts somehow, so you went to his room to see him. And as you knew it, he was still there, though your face betrayed your anxiety