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The thought starts around three in the morning, though the clock doesn’t matter because the room looks exactly the same at noon. It is just a gray space. A small, square container where the air feels like it has been breathed through a dozen times already.
The weariness isn't a normal tired. It is an ache that lives right behind the breastbone, heavy and thick, pressing down until the only logical response is to pull the knees up to the chin. A tight, small sphere. A ball. If the surface area is smaller, there is less space for the world to touch. If the arms are locked around the shins, nothing else can get inside. It is easier this way. It is a defensive posture against the simple act of existing.
I want to fucking die.
The phrase is a flat statement of fact. A structural reality. The mind looks at the sequence of tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, and it evaluates the energy required to meet those days. The math never works out. There is always a deficit.
But immediately after the coin hits they bottom, the calculation changes. The computing starts. The brain is an engine that cannot stop turning over, even when it is out of fuel, grinding its own gears into dust.
Okay, what if we just fix one thing. If the sleep gets better, the thought goes away. If the job changes, the thought goes away. If the rent is paid two weeks early, the chest stops hurting. Let's make a deal. If tomorrow is ten percent more tolerable, we stay. If the sun comes out through that specific gap in the blinds by ten, it means something. Just let me get through this week, and then next week can be different. We can change the whole routine. We can start running. We can eat better. Just let the pressure drop five points.
The bargaining is pathetic, and the mind knows it is pathetic while it is happening, which triggers the next phase of the loop.
The distraction has to be fast. It has to be loud enough to drown out the sound of the gears grinding. Reach for the phone. The screen is too bright, burning into the retinas, but the thumbs move anyway. Scroll down. Scroll up. Refresh the feed that was refreshed forty seconds ago. Read a paragraph of an article about a historical event that has no relevance to anything. Watch a video of a stranger building a house out of mud in a forest. Look at the numbers. Look at the comments. Type a search query for a symptom, then close the tab before the results load because knowing the answer is worse than asking the question.
The screen is an artificial sun, keeping the eyes open while the body begs to disappear. It doesn't actually stop the internal monologue; it just forces it to scream over the noise of the digital static.
The phone is already in the hand before the eyes are fully open anyway. It is a reflex of the thumb at this point that opens the folder labeled 'Productivity' and taps the first icon.
The interface loads. The little circle at the top spins for two seconds—two seconds of pure, high-voltage suspension where the chest forgets how to expand—and then the page settles.
No new messages.
Switch apps. Swipe up, close, tap the next one. This one has a blue logo. The search query is already saved: remote, entry-level, mid-level, anything, anywhere, within fifty miles, within the country, within the hemisphere. Filter by Past 24 Hours.
There are fourteen new listings. Three of them are ghost jobs that have been reposted every week since February. Two are commission-only sales positions disguised as management training. One requires nine years of experience with software that was invented three years ago.
Apply anyway. Click the button. The browser pulls up the internal portal—the dreaded third-party tracking system that demands a separate account, a separate password, a separate verification code sent to an email that is already overflowing with automated rejection letters.
The madness isn't just the rejection; it is the data entry. It is copying the exact information from the PDF resume and pasting it into twenty individual text boxes that ask for the exact same information, over and over, until the words lose all semantic meaning.
Name. Address. Employment History. Please list your duties in less than two hundred words.
I want to fucking die.
The thought hits right around the third time the portal glitches and deletes the description of a job held four years ago. The brain computes the time spent against the return on investment. Two hours of formatting for a generic email that will be generated by a screening algorithm three weeks from now: Thank you for your interest, however, we have decided to move forward with candidates whose qualifications more closely align...
Close the tab. Open another tab. The cycle shifts from applying to learning, because the internet says applying isn't enough anymore. You have to pivot. You have to upskill.
Open a video platform. Find a tutorial by a nineteen-year-old in a clean, sunlit room who promises a passive revenue stream through a method that feels slightly illegal but is mostly just exhausting. How to make five grand a month doing this one specific thing. Watch the cursor move across a screen, setting up an automation, building a store for digital templates, linking an affiliate account. It looks so simple. The comments say it works. This changed my life. Literal game changer.
Spend the next four hours sitting cross-legged on the mattress, ignoring the hunger in the stomach, trying to mirror the steps. Download the software. Register for the free trial. Input the credit card number, remembering to set an alarm to cancel it before the ten-day mark hits. The tutorial makes it look like painting by numbers, but when the fingers try to replicate the process, the interface doesn't match. The version has been updated. The button is gone. The server throws a four-hundred-and-four error.
The daydream starts anyway, filling the gaps where the software fails. It is a protective hallucination.
What if this is the one. What if the link goes viral. If forty people buy the template tonight, that is four hundred dollars. If forty people buy it every day, that means the rent is covered by Friday. I can tell the landlord to take the deposit out of the automatic account. I can stop checking the grocery cart total before I reach the register. I can buy the good cheese instead of the blocks that taste like wax. I can sleep until nine. I can be a person who looks out of a window with a mug of hot coffee and feels nothing but peace.
The daydream is so detailed it feels like a memory. The mind builds the entire infrastructure of a solvent life in the span of six breaths—the specific furniture in the hypothetical apartment, the lack of an ache in the ribs, the clean smell of new laundry.
Then comes the risk. The moment where the tutorial says "To scale this, you need to invest fifty dollars in targeted traffic." Fifty dollars is four days of food. Fifty dollars is the electricity bill. But the daydream is still warm in the brain, glowing like a hot coal, and the desperation makes the judgment soft. Tap the screen. Autofill the card details. Click "Confirm Payment". The confirmation page loads with a little green checkmark.
The failure takes exactly forty-five minutes to manifest.
The ad campaign goes live. The dashboard shows three clicks. Then seven. Then it stops moving. The fifty dollars vanishes into the ad manager's algorithm like water poured into dry sand. No sales. No templates downloaded. No income stream. Just a new notification from the banking app stating that the balance has dropped into the double digits.
The shortcut didn't work because shortcuts don't exist for people in gray rooms. It was a trap designed to extract the last remaining resources from people who are too tired to think straight.
Open the email app. Pull down from the top of the screen to force a refresh. The little loading wheel spins.
Nothing.
Wait fifteen seconds. Look at the wall. Look at the gap between the blinds. Pull down again. Still nothing.
Maybe the server is slow. Open the browser, type in a speed test website, check the ping. The internet is fine. The network is functional. The world is operating at normal parameters; it is just specifically ignoring this room.
The thumb moves on its own now, a separate entity driven by pure panic. Email app. Job app one. Job app two. Professional networking site where strangers post artificial stories about their corporate promotions and their gratitude for being laid off because it allowed them to "grow." Read a post by a hiring manager explaining that candidates are failing because they don't send a handwritten thank-you note within six minutes of the interview.
The chest gets tighter. The calculation engine in the brain goes into overdrive, processing the remaining savings against the price of groceries, against the utility bill, against the number of days left before the next rent payment.
If I apply to forty positions today, the probability of an interview is three percent. If I increase that to sixty, the probability rises to four and a half percent. But sixty applications means twelve hours of data entry. If I skip lunch, I can save four dollars and forty cents, which buys two more days of internet access if the billing cycle doesn't overlap.
The math is a cage. The bars are made of percentages and checkboxes.
Check the email again. There is a notification. The heart jumps into the throat, a violent, physical thud that tastes like bile. Tap the banner.
It is a newsletter. An automated digest of "jobs you might be interested in" based on an algorithm that thinks a background in writing means a desire to operate an industrial forklift in a warehouse three states away.
Then the guilt arrives, sour shit tasting like copper in the back of the mouth.
Look at this. Look at what you are doing. There are people with actual diagnoses. There are people in war zones. You are sitting in a room with four walls and electricity, and you are staring at a piece of glass wishing for the end of the world because your brain is defective. You spent money you don't have on a scheme you knew wouldn't work because you wanted an easy out. You are draining the resources of everyone who cares about you. Every text you don't answer is a small betrayal. Every time you fake a smile, you are a liar. If they knew what was actually happening under the hood, they would be horrified. Or worse, they would be bored. They are tired of hearing that you are tired.
The desperation follows the guilt like a wild animal scratching at the inside of the ribs. It wants out. It wants to tear through the skin to find oxygen because the room has run out of it. Wanting to tell the truth becomes a desire to type a response to the automated system: I am a human being. I have bills. I am sleeping in a ball because the silence of this app is killing me. Please just look at the document. Just read the words.
But the system doesn't have an inbox. The reply-to address is no-reply@.
I need to tell someone. I need to say the exact words. I need to walk up to the next person I see and say: I am not making it. The machinery is broken. I am standing on a ledge inside my own skull and the wind is blowing too hard. If I tell the truth, someone else will have to carry this for five minutes. Just five minutes.
But the truth is a weapon. If it gets dropped into a conversation, it breaks everything around it. It turns a casual dinner into an intervention. It makes people look at you with that specific, soft-eyed pity that feels like being smothered with a wet towel. So the teeth stay clenched. The jaw aches from holding the truth behind the lips, locking it down until the pressure makes the ears ring.
Instead of speaking, there is just the holding on. White-knuckle gripping onto the edge of the mattress, as if the bed might tilt and slide into a void if the fingers let go. Hold on until four in the morning. Hold on until the light outside changes from pitch black to that miserable, cold blue that signifies the arrival of another day that wasn't asked for. Five minutes have passed since the last check. Surely someone has updated a database somewhere. Tap the icon. Spin the wheel. Watch the gray space stay gray.
Regret comes with the blue light. It is a detailed ledger of every mistake made since the age of twelve. Every conversation that went wrong, every opportunity dropped out of sheer paralysis, every person who walked away because staying was too complicated. The past isn't behind; it is a wall right in front of the nose, blocking the view of anything else.
If I hadn't said that. If I had moved to that city. If I hadn't let that relationship rot from the inside out out of pure cowardice. I ruined the trajectory before it even started, and now I am just managing the debris.
The eyes start to sting. The frying sensation begins—that dry, overheated feeling in the sockets where the tears should be but aren't, because the tear ducts are as exhausted as the rest of the nervous system. The brain feels like a circuit board that has been left on in a closed closet during a heatwave. Everything is melting into a single, sticky mass of high-voltage panic.
The computing starts again, faster now because the sun is up and the world is demanding participation.
How many hours until it is acceptable to go back to sleep? Nine hours of work, two hours of chores, one hour of pretending to be an active participant in human society. That is twelve hours. If I can partition the day into fifteen-minute blocks, that is forty-eight blocks. I can do forty-eight blocks. I just have to move the fingers across the keyboard for block one. Then block two. Don't look at the whole tower, just look at the brick currently in front of you. What is the minimum amount of effort required to not get fired? Do that. Exactly that. No more.
The desire to escape isn't about an airplane ticket or a new house. It is a desire to escape the perspective. To get out from behind these specific eyes, out of this specific skin. To be a rock, or a piece of old timber at the bottom of a lake, or nothing at all. Just the absence of consciousness.
And under all of it, like a low-frequency hum from a broken appliance, is the constant fear.
It is the dread of the phone ringing. The dread of an email notification. The dread of the grocery store, of the cashier asking how the day is going, of having to find the correct configuration of facial muscles to reply "Good, thanks, and you?" without the voice cracking. The fear that this specific state of mind is permanent. That the floor has dropped out completely this time, and there is no bottom, just an endless descent through the gray.
How does this actually end?
The thought is clinical now. Curious, almost. "Does it end with a sudden snap, or does it just wear down until the battery doesn't hold a charge at all? Does it end in a hospital room twenty years from now with the same gray walls, or does the impulse win on some random Tuesday when the traffic is bad and the sky is too bright?"
The mind tries to figure it out, building scenarios, weighing options, calculating probabilities until the sun is fully up, hitting the mirror on the closet door and throwing a sharp, painful line of white light across the bed.
The alarm goes off.
The sound is a drill into the ear. The body untwists from the ball, the joints popping in the cold air. The feet hit the floor. The chest tightens immediately as the weight of the day drops onto the shoulders.
The sound is a drill into the ear. The body untwists from the ball, the joints popping in the cold air. The feet hit the floor. The chest tightens immediately as the weight of the day drops onto the shoulders.
The first thought of the morning is exactly the same as the last thought of the night.
I want to fucking die.
But the kettle needs to be turned on. The shoes need to be laced. The script needs to be read. The day begins, and with it, the circle completes its first turn, ready to start the calculation all over again by lunchtime.
⋆⋅ 𖤓 ⋅⋆
The plastic wrapper of the spicy seafood noodle cup was slightly dusty under her thumb. Ada blinked, the neon glare of the overhead fluorescent tubes instantly cutting through the fog in her brain. Her eyes burned. Her legs were stiff, aching from standing completely still in the middle of Aisle 3 for twenty straight minutes.
Twenty minutes. She knew the time because she had been staring at the digital clock right above the cold drinks section before her mind drifted into that space where the numbers in her bank account kept shifting and disappearing.
"Miss? Are you okay?"
The voice belonged to the cashier, a young guy in a blue vest with a faded nametag that read Mark. He was leaning over the counter, his eyebrows pulled together in genuine concern. He had been watching her. Of course he had. Who stands in front of a shelf of instant ramen for nearly half an hour without moving a single muscle?
Ada felt her cheeks burn with a wave of heat. "Oh. Yes. Sorry. Just... choosing," she mumbled, her voice sounding raspy even to her own ears.
She lowered her gaze back to the noodle cup. It was four dollars and fifty cents. Four dollars and fifty cents for a single meal that would be gone in five minutes and leave her hungry again by midnight. If she bought it, her balance would drop to twelve dollars exactly. Twelve dollars to survive the remaining four days of the week. The calculation was a tiny beast inside her chest, clawing at her ribs, telling her to put the cup down, telling her to walk away before she spent money she didn't have.
"Need help finding anything else?" Mark asked, his hand hovering over the barcode scanner.
"No, I'm good. Thank you," Ada said, her fingers tightening around the cardboard container.
"That one is pretty popular, but the price went up this week," a voice suddenly spoke from right behind her shoulder.
The voice was deep, smooth, and completely unexpected. Ada stiffened, her breath catching in her throat. She didn't have time to step back before a large, sun-tanned hand reached past her face, his fingers brushing against the plastic wrappers as he grabbed four, five, six of the exact same noodle cups she had been staring at.
She turned her head slightly, her eyes widening as she took in the sight of him. He was tall, easily close to six feet, with a frame that seemed to fill the narrow aisle completely. His hair was a bright, striking shade of blonde, messy in a way that looked deliberate and effortless, falling across his forehead in loose strands. He didn't look at her immediately; he was focused on loading the noodle cups into his arms like they were nothing more than loose change.
"It's a rip-off, honestly," the blonde guy continued as he finally glanced down at her. His eyes were ocean blue under the store lights. "But it's the only thing that tastes like real food when you've been awake for thirty hours."
Ada couldn't form words. Her tongue felt thick. She just stood there as he turned on his heel and moved away toward the front of the store.
She watched his back as he walked. He was moving through the exact same columns she had spent the last hour wandering through—past the cheap chips, past the row of day-old sandwiches, past the clearance shelf near the back. There was something familiar about the way he carried himself, a sort of casual confidence that she knew she had seen somewhere before.
Then she saw the fabric of his sleeve. He was wearing a dark navy hoodie with thick white block letters across the back: STATE UNIVERSITY ATHLETICS.
Ada looked down at her own chest. She was wearing the exact same hoodie, the cuffs frayed at the wrists, the fabric thinned out from too many trips through the laundromat. They went to the same school. They probably walked the same quad, sat in the same massive lecture halls, breathed the same dusty library air. She tried to search her memory, digging through the faces of the people in her marketing seminars and her general education classes, but nothing clicked. She couldn't remember who he was. In a university with thirty thousand students, he was just another face, yet he stood out so much it felt stupid that she didn't know his name.
The guy reached the counter, dropping the stack of noodles in front of Mark. He pulled a crisp twenty-dollar bill from his pocket, tossed it down, and didn't even wait for his change.
"Keep it," he told the cashier, grabbing the plastic bag before walking straight out the glass double doors into the cool night air. The little bell above the door chimed once, a clean sound that signaled his departure.
Ada stood alone in Aisle 3, her hand empty now because she had quietly slipped the four-dollar noodle cup back onto the wire shelf while he was paying. She couldn't do it. She couldn't bring herself to spend the money.
Instead of leaving, she moved slowly toward the front corner of the store, near the window. There was a small roller grill station there, the kind that smelled strongly of grease, salt, and cheap meat. Two lonely hotdogs were spinning slowly on the metal rods, glistening under a heat lamp that radiated a thick, artificial warmth.
She stood close to it, letting the heat wash over her bare face and hands. The air smelled thick, almost sweet with the scent of roasted meat and warm buns. She closed her eyes for a moment, inhaling deeply, trying to trick her stomach into believing that the smell was enough to fill the void. It was a pathetic tactic, something she had started doing over the last month when the grocery budget ran out before the calendar page turned, but it helped. Standing by the hotdog station made her feel a little less cold, a little less detached from the world of people who actually ate three meals a day.
Mark gave her a sympathetic look from behind the register, but he didn't tell her to leave. He just went back to wiping down the counter with a yellow cloth.
Ada stayed there for another ten minutes, just letting the warmth of the lamp sink into her skin, until the guilt of loitering became greater than her desire to stay warm. She pulled her hood up over her hair, tucked her hands into her pockets, and walked toward the exit.
When she pushed the glass door open, the chilly air hit her instantly, making her shiver beneath the university cotton. She took a step onto the concrete sidewalk, her eyes fixed on the ground as she prepared herself for the long walk back to her apartment.
"You took your time in there."
Ada gasped, her head snapping up.
The blonde guy was leaning against the brick wall right next to the ice dispenser. He had one leg hooked back against the wall, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his jeans. The navy university hoodie looked massive on him, the white letters clean against the dark background.
Before she could even ask why he was still here, he straightened up and stepped into her space. He reached out, extending a heavy white plastic bag toward her. Through the thin material, she could see the distinct shapes of the noodle cups he had bought minutes before, along with a couple of bottled juices he must have picked up at the last second.
"Here," Leon said, his voice dropping slightly as he held the bag out between them, waiting for her to take it.
The white plastic bag hovered between them. Ada looked at the bag, then up at his face. The blonde strands of his hair were messy, catching the dim light from the convenience store window. He looked completely at ease, standing there with a casual confidence that made hard for her to breath.
"Keep it," Ada said, her voice small but firm. She didn't let her gaze linger on his amber eyes. She didn't want him to see the desperation she had been carrying around all evening.
She stepped past him, her sneakers scraping against the rough concrete sidewalk. She kept her head down, pulling the drawstrings of her navy university hoodie until the fabric obscured most of her face. She just needed to get back to her room. She needed to lock the door and pretend the outside world didn't exist for a few hours.
"Hey. Wait up."
She heard his footsteps behind her. They weren't fast or aggressive. He was keeping a safe distance, about three feet back, matching her slow, exhausted pace.
"It's just food, State U," his voice drifted over her shoulder, entirely unbothered by her cold reception. "It's not a crime to accept a little help when you've been staring at a shelf for twenty minutes like it owes you money."
Ada didn't stop. She accelerated her steps, though her thighs felt like lead. "I don't need your charity. I told you, I'm fine."
"Right. You looked incredibly fine standing by the roller grill just to stay warm," he countered. There was no mockery in his tone, just a plain statement of fact that made her blood run hot with embarrassment.
She spun around, her sneakers skidding slightly on a patch of loose gravel. She threw a fierce glare at him, her dark eyes flashing under the hood. "I said I'm fine! I'm just tired. Go away."
As if on cue, a loud, treacherous sound rumbled from the deep recesses of her stomach. It was a hollow growl, completely audible in the crisp night air.
Ada froze, the heat in her cheeks turning into a full burn. She tried to maintain her posture, to look tall and firm, but the effort was too much for her depleted energy reserves. The world tilted slightly to the left. The black asphalt beneath her feet seemed to wave like water. Her knees buckled just a fraction, and she swayed, her balance slipping away for a terrifying second.
Before she could fall, she caught herself, anchoring her feet onto the pavement.
Leon didn't lunge forward to grab her, respecting the boundary she had drawn, but his relaxed posture disappeared. His shoulders went rigid. His eyes softened, filled with so much gentle concern for a stranger. He looked at her like he could see right through the worn fabric of her hoodie, straight into the empty, broken math of her bank account.
Ten, the tension in his jaw relaxed, and that familiar, easy smile crept back onto his lips. He let out a soft huff of laughter. "You're stubborn, you know that? Stubborn and kind of cute when you're trying to look dangerous."
Ada stared at him, incredulous. Cute? She hadn't washed her hair in three days, her eyes had dark circles that looked like bruises, and she was currently vibrating from a lack of glucose.
Without a word, she raised her hand and flipped him a single, clear middle finger.
She turned around and marched ahead, her boots hitting the sidewalk with as much force as she could muster.
Leon didn't get angry. Instead, he started to jog, his long legs moving in a slow, easy stride to keep pace with her fast walk. He stayed on the outer edge of the sidewalk, near the curb, keeping that same respectful distance while he talked.
"Nice gesture. Very classy," he said, his breath coming in easy bursts as he jogged beside her. "We just passed the old bookstore, by the way. You know the one with the broken neon sign? They're hiring. Three days a week. It pays twelve an hour. Just thought you might want to know."
Ada kept her eyes locked straight ahead, refusing to look at him.
"And look at that," Leon continued, gesturing toward a dark alleyway they were crossing. "The streetlights are completely out on this block. Good thing I'm here. A small girl in an oversized hoodie shouldn't be walking through the dark campus edge alone at four in the morning. Especially one who sways when the wind blows."
"I am not small," she snapped, her teeth clenched.
"Compared to me? You're tiny, State U," he teased, his voice full of amusement. "But you've got a lot of fight in you. I like that."
She kept walking, her breath coming faster now, the cold air stinging the back of her throat. Her mind was trying to compute how many blocks were left until her building, trying to ignore the way her stomach was twisting itself into knots. But despite the fear, despite the constant exhaustion that usually filled her gray spaces, his voice was doing something strange. It was keeping the dark thoughts at bay. It was too loud, too living, to let her sink back into the ball.
Leon slowed his jog down to a walk as they reached the final stretch of the avenue, near the student housing complexes. He stopped near a large oak tree, letting her walk a few paces ahead before he called out to her.
"Hey," he said.
Ada stopped, her back to him. She didn't turn around, but she listened.
"You're going to be okay," Leon said, his voice losing the consistent teasing edge he had for the last ten minutes. "Good days will come eventually. I hope to see you then."
Ada stood completely still in the cold blue dawn. She didn't look back at his ocean-blue eyes, and she didn't lower her hood. Instead, she slowly raised her right arm, lifting her hand high enough for the white block letters of his university hoodie to frame it, and flipped him off a second time.
She kept walking into the gray.