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Every day, every hour, they never loosened their grip, never faded into silence.
Fifteen, and already carrying the weight of days that felt repeated rather than lived, like time was moving but never taking him with it.
Philip didn’t understand it. Nothing in his life seemed broken, nothing that should have left a mark this deep.
He had been given all the reasons to be happy, yet something inside him refused to believe them.
Wondering why he was such a coward, wondering if somebody actually cared.
It didn't seem like it. He was someone you could address as a nobody. That was the part that hurt the most.
It's not like Philip wanted to be popular, he just wanted to be seen, to be heard.
...
Philip woke up to the dull insistence of his alarm, the sound dragging him out of sleep.
For a moment he stayed still, staring at the cieling, as if he was waiting for something to feel different.
Nothing did.
The same heaviness settled over him, familiar and unwelcome, like it had been waiting for him to open his eyes.
He pushed himself out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom, barely glancing at his reflection.
Everything felt rehearsed, like he'd done it a thousand times before whithout ever really being there for any of it.
He got dressed slowly, pulling on whatever was closest.
He didn't bother having breakfast. Hunger felt easier to ignore than everything else.
And just like every other day, nothing about it felt new
It was a normal day at school, nothing exciting happened. He arrived home, parents weren't home. "Strange." he mumbled.
Philip went into his room and took off his clothes to change into more comfortable clothes. He took a moment to stare at the multiple scars he had on his thigh.
The scars lined his thigh. Thin, pale, impossible to ignore. They stared back at him, like they remembered every little thing that he tried to forget.
He looked away first, then changed into his pajamas, pulling his headphones on, like a barrier. He started doing his homework. When he was in the middle of doing his math homework, he heard a strange noise. He went to check if his parents had arrived. They hadn't.
He went to check the source of the noise, the medicine cabinet opened by itself and some pills fell from their container.
Philip had the urge to go and swallow all of those pills. Every. Last. One. Just to quiet the noise inside his head, to finally escape the relentless repetition of days that felt more like punishment than living.
The thought lingered more than it should've, curling around his mind, whispering promises of silence, of rest, of an end to the exhaustion that clung to him no matter how many hours he slept.
It wasn't even about wanting to die, not entirely. It was about wanting everything to stop. The thoughts, the unbearable weight in his chest, the feeling that he was trapped in a life that kept moving without him.
He stood there for a long moment, wondering how some this as small as a handful of pills could feel like both an ending and a kind of relief
That scared him mored than anything. The idea didn't feel foreign anymore, but familiar.
He gathered the pills brought them to his mouth, shutting his eyes while tears poured out of them.
"I'm putting an end to this damm spiral" Philip asserted.
He thought it would feel louder. More dramatic. As if something inside would scream or fight
back.
it didn't
it was soft.
Like sinking beneath water and realizing the surface was farther away than it should be.
His thoughts, once relentless, began to blur at the edges, loosing their sharpness, their bite.
And in that quiet, something in him loosened. Not relief, not quite peace, but the absence of the constant ache he had grown used to carrying.
For the first time in what it felt like forever, they weren't clawing at him. They weren't demanding anything from him.
The world didn't end all at once. It simply slipped away from him, piece by piece, until even the weight of himself was gone.
That was until a man's voice pierced through the silence.
"We're home!"
It was his father's voice .
Alexander's voice.
By the time Alexander saw Philip's body, laying lifeless on the ground, it was too late to do anything.