Chapter 329: Dark days
C YA N
The darkness was total.
I had pulled the heavy velvet drapes across the window weeks ago, overlapping the thick fabric until not a single sliver of the afternoon sun could pierce the bedroom.
It made the day and the night exactly the same thing, which was the entire point.
Time had stopped having any real meaning around the third day, or maybe the fourth. I couldn’t be sure anymore.
The numbers in my head just spun in circles, unmoored from the ticking of the clock downstairs.
I wasn’t in the bed. The mattress felt too deliberate, too much like a choice I had to consciously make.
Instead, I was on the hardwood floor, tucked into the narrow gap between the bed frame and the wall. The floor just happened. At some point my legs had simply refused to carry my weight, and I sat down, and I hadn’t found a single reason to get back up.
My clothes had accumulated around my ankles and hips like sediment, heavy and discarded, smelling faintly of perfume and stale air.
The room was telling on me. It always did when I stopped maintaining the daily performance of being a functional human being.
The top three drawers of the dresser were still yanked wide open, their contents spilling out over the edges where I had dug for something I couldn’t remember now. Books and papers lay scattered where they had fallen from the shelves.
On the far wall, the full-length mirror no longer faced the space. I had physically turned it toward the plaster two weeks after standing in front of it for far too long, staring at the strange, hollow shape of my own eyes until my reflection didn’t even look like a person anymore.
I kept my left forearm pulled tightly against my ribs, the sleeve of my soft wool sweater dragged down past my knuckles.
The marks underneath were covered. They were always covered, even here, even in the absolute dark where there was no one left to see them.
It was an old, stubborn habit, hiding the thin, red tracks of my own desperate coping mechanisms even when I knew for a fact that nobody was coming through that door.
The only things moving in the dark were the voices. They were my own, every single one of them, which was the exact part I could never explain to anyone else.
To anyone who hasn’t heard their own mind violently turn on them, it sounds like madness. To me, it was just the loud, crowded reality of my own skull.
He’s not waking up, the first one whispered, a cold, sharp blade of a thought.
You were standing right there on the dock when it happened, another answered, heavier and thick with disgust.
You did absolutely nothing to stop it.
You left him there in that hospital.
You always run away when the blood starts to show.
He never chose you, Cyan. He never would have chosen you.
He won’t wake up. He’s going to die in that white room and he won’t even remember your face.
Sometimes the noise inside my head was manageable. It would retreat into a dull, low hum, a background racket that I could breathe through if I pressed my forehead hard enough against my knees.
But sometimes it wasn’t. And the room always showed the wreckage afterward.
There was a shattered ceramic lamp near the nightstand, its white pieces glinting faintly in the dark, and a shallow indentation in the drywall where my knuckles had struck the plaster the night before.
It was the messy archaeology of a person trying to fight their own brain from the inside out, using their bare hands to silence the thoughts.
The pills weren’t helping the way they used to. The orange plastic bottles were sitting on the edge of the dresser, but I had been taking them irregularly at best.
Sometimes the simple physical act of swallowing something down your throat required more focus, more raw intention, than my body possessed.
Reginald still came twice a day, without a single exception. His knock was always identical... three measured, quiet raps against the heavy oak that never varied in speed or volume.
He would slip inside the threshold, placing the silver tray down on the small table by the entry if I refused to take it from his hands.
"You should eat, sir," he would say into the shadows. His voice was always very soft, very level. "Whenever you’re ready."
He never said you must. He never told me this is too much, Cyan. He was just present. He had been present exactly like that since I was eleven years old, back when the world first broke apart in front of me and showed me what it was truly capable of doing to a child.
Every single time he brought a fresh tray, he would place the daily dose of medication right beside the small plate of food. He never made a comment when he noticed the previous days’ pills hadn’t moved an inch.
He would simply pick up the old, untouched glass, replace it with a fresh one filled with cold water, and slip back out into the hall without a sound.
The days had no edges now. If someone had stood over me and demanded the date, I couldn’t have told them how much time had drifted past since I walked out of Nick’s apartment.
Since Reginald had driven to that neighborhood, walked up the stairs, and found me curled into a tight ball on the couch inside a stranger’s apartment.
Because that’s what Nick was. A stranger. A temporary solution who had happened to be in the right hallway at the worst moment of my life. He was nothing more than that.
Except, sometimes, when the whispering in my ears grew so loud that I needed a different shape to look at, my mind would slip backward against my will. It didn’t happen intentionally, but the memory would come anyway, bright and intrusive.
