My mind was agitated. Like a bird trapped in a box, hitting every wall, trying to find a way out. My breath was stuck somewhere in my chest, heavy, like a stone pressing down. My hands moved on their own, searching around me, looking for something, anything, to make it all stop.
I pressed myself into the corner of the room. The cold wall against my back was the only thing keeping me from falling apart. My body wouldn’t stop shaking. My throat burned from holding back a sound I didn’t want to make.
Then, my phone buzzed. A message.
“I dreamt of you,” he wrote. “A man in a suit stood behind you. Watching. Worried. I think it was your father.”
I blinked at the screen. My father. The one person who still had a hold on me. Was this just a random dream? Or was I desperate for it to mean something? Maybe I needed it to. Maybe I was searching for some kind of sign.
“If you ever need help, you can count on me.”
I stared at it for a moment, frozen.
“How?” I typed, my fingers shaking.
“Any way you know. Any way you need.”
Before I could think more about it, another message came through. It was my bestfriend. when we started talking, she could tell something was wrong. She asked me what was going on, and I admitted that I was thinking about how to disappear without anyone noticing. She didn’t just leave it there. she kept pushing, gently insisting that we talk it through together before anything happened. She kept reminding me she was there, that I wasn’t alone.
The two conversations happened weirdly at the time I needed them the most. words were small, but they felt like something solid in the dark. A hand reaching out when I wasn’t sure I deserved to be pulled back.
I still felt like I was sinking, but maybe, for a moment, I didn’t have to fight it alone.