Archive of Our Own

Sometimes Josh wished it looked like how the internet made it look.
Not the sharp, real kind of pain, cold and humiliating and sticky with regret, but the softened version. The filtered version. The one where the lighting is always dim in a cinematic way instead of just bad, where everything feels like it belongs in a music video instead of a bathroom stall at 4:12am. Where sadness is aesthetic instead of exhausting.

In his head, it was never shaking hands and clenched teeth trying not to make noise. It was always quieter and more gentler, like someone had already stepped in and made it safe without asking him to explain why it wasn’t.

Sometimes he imagined it like this: Someone sitting in front of him, not flinching at the reality of him. Not looking away too quickly, not pretending they hadn’t noticed. Just staying. Like it didn’t scare them.
And maybe they’d reach out, not rushed, not desperate, just steady, and tilt his chin up like he wasn’t something to be ashamed of seeing. Like the parts of him that felt ruined didn’t make him unworthy of being looked at softly.

Maybe they’d kiss his scars the way people in books always did, like affection could rewrite history. Like touch could turn damage into something holy. Like the past didn’t have to win just because it happened first.

And Josh knew, somewhere deep under the part of him that liked the idea too much, that it wasn’t real in the way his brain wanted it to be.
Because real life didn’t pause for tenderness. Real life didn’t come with perfect timing or forgiving lighting or someone who knew exactly where to place their hands so nothing felt worse.
But still, his mind went there anyway.

It always went there anyway.

Sometimes it was worse when it was quiet, because then the images had room to grow. The version where someone brushed his hair back from his face like he wasn’t too messy to be held. The version where blood wasn’t something that made people step away or panic, but something that got met with calm hands and a voice saying I’ve got you like it was simple. Like it wasn’t too much.

He hated how much he wanted it.
Not the pain. But the aftermath. The imagined softness that came too late in reality, so his mind stitched it in where it didn’t belong.
Because in his head, it made sense. In his head, it made everything bearable, like if someone could just see him in that exact moment and still choose to stay, then maybe it meant he wasn’t as broken as it felt.

But the truth always sat underneath it, heavier.
People didn’t usually know what to do with blood, or silence, or the kind of hurt that didn’t have a clean explanation. They didn’t kiss it better. They called it what it was. They cleaned it up. They stepped back.

And Josh understood that. He did.
That didn’t stop his mind from rewriting it anyway.

From turning the worst moments into something almost beautiful, like if he could make it pretty enough in his head, it would hurt less when it happened in real life. Like romanticising it was a kind of control, if he could shape the image, maybe he wouldn’t feel so completely at its mercy.

Still, there were moments when even that illusion cracked.

When it wasn’t aesthetic at all. When it was just him sitting there afterwards, staring at his own hands like they belonged to someone else, wondering how something so internal could spill so visibly into the world.

And in those moments, the fantasy didn’t feel comforting.

It felt like grief.
Because what he really wanted wasn’t the cinematic version of pain.
It was the part after it.
The part where someone didn’t look away.
Where he didn’t have to turn it into something beautiful just to make it survivable.
Where he could exist, messy, bleeding, human, and still be met with something steady enough not to disappear.

And sometimes, in the quietest corners of his mind, he let himself imagine that too.
Not as a fantasy.
Just as a possibility he didn’t quite know how to believe in yet.

Josh doesn’t pretend anymore.
He used to, though. Back when it was easier to bend reality into something softer than it was. Back when he could convince himself that laughter in a group meant inclusion, that shared silence meant understanding, that proximity meant connection. He used to build entire friendships out of half-smiles in corridors and borrowed jokes and the brief relief of someone saying his name like it mattered.

He used to think they fit together.

Like puzzle pieces, like they’d all been dropped into the same box and, eventually, they’d click into place if he just kept trying to turn himself the right way.

But that idea doesn’t survive him anymore.
Now he knows what it is.

They don’t hate him. That would almost be easier. Hate is clear. Hate has edges. Hate means you still register in someone’s emotional world strongly enough to matter.

This is worse than that.
It’s neutral.

They tolerate him the way people tolerate a habit they never fully agreed to pick up. He’s there because he’s always been there. Because removing him would take effort, and keeping him requires none.

In school, he’s part of the background noise. A familiar shape in the room. Someone who can be spoken to if necessary, someone who can be included if the group dynamic demands it, but never quite pulled into the centre of anything. Never quite chosen.

They laugh with him, sometimes. At the right moments. At the safe moments.
But the laughter never seems to follow him out of the building.

And he notices that more than he lets on.
He notices it in the way conversations stop when he walks up, then restart in a different direction, like he’s a pause button nobody meant to press. In the way plans are made just out of earshot and only ever mentioned after the fact, in passing, like they weren’t meant to be hidden but also weren’t meant to include him.

There are no texts outside school hours.
No “are you coming?” No “we’re here already.” No “save you a spot.”
Just the clean silence of being compartmentalised.

School Josh exists in one place. Home Josh exists somewhere else. And neither version seems to be invited into the other people’s worlds.

He used to tell himself that meant nothing. That people were just busy. That friendships didn’t have to be constant to be real. That he was overthinking it, like always.

But that was before he stopped mistaking access for affection.
Now he sees the pattern too clearly to unsee it.
He is included, but not chosen. Present, but not sought. Allowed, but not missed.
So he stops pretending there’s something deeper underneath it.
Stops reconstructing meaning out of scraps.
Stops convincing himself that being tolerated is just a quieter version of being cared for.
And the strange part is that once the pretending stops, nothing changes on the surface. They’re still polite. Still normal. Still easy with him in the way people are easy with things that don’t require emotional investment.

But inside him, something settles into place.
Just final in a way that makes everything quieter.
Because when you stop expecting people to reach for you, you also stop waiting for it.
And that’s what Josh is left with.

Not friendship.
Not even rejection.
Just distance, made consistent enough to feel like a rule rather than an accident.

So Josh stops showing up in the ways that require effort.
It doesn’t happen loudly. There’s no decision point, no dramatic exit. It’s just gradual, like a light dimming without anyone noticing the switch.

One day he’s still sitting with them at lunch, laughing at the right moments, keeping his shoulders angled in so he fits the space they leave him. And then the next, he’s just… not.
Not because anyone asked him to leave.
Because no one noticed when he started staying away.

His room becomes the only place that feels predictable. Not safe, he wouldn’t give it that much credit, but predictable. The door closes and nothing expects anything from him anymore. No one glances at him like they’re waiting for him to say the right thing. No one pauses mid-sentence when he enters like he’s disrupted a conversation that was never meant to include him in the first place.
It’s just him.
And the silence.

At first, he tries to fill it. Music too loud. Phone brightness too high. Anything to keep his mind from turning inward too quickly. But silence is patient. It waits him out. It always wins in the end.

And when it does, everything he’s been holding down starts to surface at once.
Not in neat thoughts. Not in anything he can organise or explain.
Just fragments.

Moments he replayed too many times. Things he shouldn’t have said. Things he should have said. The way people look at him and then look away again like it costs them nothing. The way he can stand in a room full of voices and still feel like he’s outside it, pressing his face to glass.
There’s no comfort in it, even if part of him tries to call it that.

It’s more like falling into something that was already open inside him.
And the worst part is how familiar it feels.
Like his brain recognises the pattern and stops fighting it halfway through. Like it’s easier to sink into it than to keep pretending he can climb out of it alone.
But even in that space, there’s a split in him that won’t fully disappear.

One part that wants to disappear into it completely, stop translating himself for people who don’t read him anyway, stop trying to be understood in rooms where no one is looking for him.

And another part that still notices the edges of things.

The fact is that isolation doesn’t actually erase anything. It just removes witnesses.

The fact is that being alone doesn’t make the thoughts quieter, it just makes them louder, because there’s nothing left to interrupt them.

The fact is that “no one looking through him” isn’t the same as being seen.

So he sits there in it.
Not as an escape, not as a relief, but as something he’s fallen into without quite realising how deep it goes.

And eventually, even that starts to feel less like choice and more like momentum.
Like a door closing behind him that he didn’t fully mean to shut.

Josh doesn’t feel happy anymore, and it’s not even dramatic enough to call it sadness most of the time.

It’s flatter than that.
Like something inside him has been slowly drained until there’s nothing sharp left to name. No anger that burns long enough to push him forward. No hope that sticks long enough to build on. Just a kind of dull, heavy absence where everything used to be.

And in that absence, his mind keeps filling the space. Not kindly or gently, just persistently.

Thoughts looping back on themselves until they lose meaning but not intensity. Replaying things he can’t fix. People he can’t reach. Moments that feel slightly wrong no matter how many times he re-run them, like there’s always a detail he missed that somehow explains everything about why he feels like this.
And somewhere in that noise, a lie starts to form, quiet at first, almost reasonable in the way it presents itself.

That if he wasn’t here, it would stop.
That the pressure would finally lift. That the static would clear. That everything inside him would go quiet in a way it never does when he’s awake, aware, trying to be a person in rooms that don’t seem to hold him properly.

It’s not really about wanting nothing, its about wanting relief from something that feels like it’s inside him and never leaves.

But the thought doesn’t actually bring relief. It just narrows everything. Makes the world smaller. Makes him smaller inside it. Like his mind is trying to solve pain by removing the person experiencing it, instead of addressing the pain itself.

And that’s the part that doesn’t feel romantic or cinematic when it really settles in.
It feels isolating in a different way.
Because even in that line of thinking, there’s still no peace, just more silence. More spiralling. More of him, alone with himself, with no one left to interrupt the loop.

He lies there in his room and it all presses in at once, the social distance, the absence of being chosen, the weight of feeling unseen even when he’s physically present in the world—and it convinces him, for moments at a time, that he’s already slipped out of where he’s supposed to be.
But those moments pass.

And what’s left isn’t disappearance.
It’s still him. Still here. Still carrying it.
Just with nowhere for it to go.

The only thing that really keeps Josh company at night is noise.

Not silence, that’s the dangerous part. Silence gives everything too much room to breathe, too much space to turn inward and start folding over itself.

So he fills it.
Music pushed too loud through cheap headphones until it becomes less like something he hears and more like something he’s trapped inside. The kind of sound that doesn’t leave room for thought, only for endurance. It presses against the edges of his skull, steady and unrelenting, like if he turns it up enough it might hold everything else in place.

And then there’s the glow of his laptop.
The screen becomes its own small world, sharp and artificial in the dark of his room. It keeps him anchored in a way that doesn’t feel like grounding so much as distraction, anything to stop his mind from circling the same places again.

He types things he wouldn’t say out loud.
Fragments of sentences. Half-formed thoughts dressed up as poetry because calling it poetry makes it feel like it belongs somewhere outside of him instead of rotting quietly inside. Lines about being tired in ways sleep doesn’t fix. About feeling like a shadow in rooms full of people who never turn their heads far enough to notice.

He posts them into the void.
Refreshes. Waits. Refreshes again.

Sometimes there are likes. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes a comment that feels like it’s aimed at the idea of sadness rather than him specifically. And he can’t tell which part hurts more, that people see it, or that even when they do, it still doesn’t turn into anything that feels like connection.

But it’s something.
A signal. Proof that he exists in a way that can be acknowledged without requiring anyone to actually know him.

And he tells himself that’s enough.
That this version of being seen, the distant, filtered version, is the closest he’s going to get to anything resembling understanding. That maybe this is what it means to be known: not as a person someone reaches for, but as a mood someone scrolls past and briefly feels.

But even that idea starts to blur after a while.
Because the more he leans into it, the less it feels like expression and the more it feels like repetition. The same thoughts, reshaped slightly to fit different nights. The same ache, flattened into lines that sound almost pretty if you don’t read too closely.

And underneath all of it, there’s still him.
Still awake when he shouldn’t be. Still trying to turn something unbearable into something legible. Still sitting in the glow of a screen, waiting for something external to confirm that what he feels has weight outside of his own head.

The music keeps going.
The laptop stays open.
And the night doesn’t get kinder.
It just keeps moving forward with him inside it.

On the internet it feels like no one really looks up long enough to judge.

That’s the strange comfort of it. Not acceptance exactly, more like mutual invisibility. Everyone is speaking into the same dark, everyone is answering themselves through other people’s words. Reblog after retweet of half-healed sentences, quotes about surviving things that still feel unfinished, posts that say it gets better, God loves you sitting right next to posts that clearly don’t believe it.

Josh scrolls through it like it’s air.
Like it’s the only place where the shape of what he feels has already been named by someone else.

There’s a language for it here. A shorthand. Tags tweets and reposts that don’t need explanation. Pain turned into aesthetics, exhaustion turned into text posts, loneliness turned into something you can reblog instead of having to say out loud.

And he tells himself that’s why it feels safe.
Because nobody asks for details. Nobody asks what happened in the exact order it fell apart. Nobody tries to fix it in a way that makes him feel more exposed than understood.
People just… respond.

Sometimes with softness. Sometimes with distance. Sometimes with the same emptiness reflected back at him, like a mirror that doesn’t insist on anything except recognition.
And in that, there’s a kind of illusion of closeness.
A feeling that he isn’t the only one sitting up too late with too much in his head and nowhere for it to land properly. That other people are also holding things they don’t fully say out loud. That silence between posts is shared, even if it isn’t explained.

But it’s still not the same as being known.
It just looks like it for long enough that he can almost believe it.

Because once the screen goes dim and the room stops feeling like part of the world, it’s still just him again, no audience, no shared understanding, just the same thoughts returning in slightly different shapes.
And whatever connection he thought he felt online doesn’t follow him into that part.
It stays behind in the feed.
Fading the moment he stops scrolling.

They spend too much time in bathrooms.

That’s what Josh notices first, not even the posts themselves, not the grainy black-and-white photos or the late-night confessions typed in lowercase like softness can make suffering easier to swallow.

It’s the bathrooms.

Cold tile floors. Locked doors. Sink counters cluttered with half-dead reflections and fluorescent lighting that turns everyone into ghosts. Mirrors that people stare into for too long, trying to recognise themselves through the fog of exhaustion and hurt and whatever else has rooted itself deep inside them.

The bathroom becomes a kind of ritual space online. Somewhere people go when everything in their head feels unbearable to carry in open air.
And Josh understands that more than he wants to.

Because there’s something strangely symbolic about it, isn’t there? Standing in front of a sink at two in the morning like maybe you can wash yourself clean of whatever is clawing around inside your chest. Like if you scrub hard enough, rinse long enough, stay still long enough, you might finally feel different when you look up again.

As though pain is something physical. Something that can be drained out instead of survived through.

But it never really works like that.
The thoughts don’t leave just because the water runs.
The loneliness doesn’t dissolve under fluorescent lights.
And whatever darkness lives in a person’s mind always seems heavier in rooms where there’s nowhere else to look except your own reflection.

Josh knows that too well.
He scrolls through post after post of people trying to articulate the same impossible thing, that feeling of carrying something inside yourself that feels alive even when you know it technically isn’t. Fear. Depression. Self-hatred. Grief. All those invisible things that somehow still manage to take up space in a body.

People describe them like monsters because monsters are easier to picture than mental illness. Easier to explain than emptiness. Easier than admitting your own brain can turn against you so quietly you barely notice it happening until every thought sounds sharpened at the edges.

And online, everyone seems to speak that language fluently.
Not because they’re okay.
But because they’re all trying, desperately, to make the invisible visible.
To give shape to feelings that otherwise just sit heavy and unnamed in the dark.

Josh reads all of it with his headphones blaring loud enough to drown out his own breathing, and for a while it almost feels comforting, not the suffering itself, but the recognition. The proof that other people also carry things they can’t explain properly.

But eventually even that starts to hollow out.
Because seeing pain reflected everywhere doesn’t necessarily make a person feel less alone. Sometimes it just makes the loneliness feel larger, shared by thousands of people all reaching toward each other through screens without ever really touching.

And beneath all the metaphors and poetry and carefully curated sadness, Josh starts to realise something he hates:
Nobody actually knows how to save each other there.

They can offer words. Retweets. Fragments of comfort typed at impossible hours of the night.
But they’re all still sitting alone in their own rooms afterwards, staring at ceilings, trying to survive themselves until morning.

Josh knows his parents try.
That’s what makes it worse sometimes.
If they were cruel, if they were careless in some obvious, undeniable way, maybe he could turn his hurt into anger instead of guilt. Maybe it would be easier to explain the distance between them if it had been built out of shouting matches or slammed doors or words sharp enough to leave visible wounds.

But it isn’t.
It’s exhaustion.
It’s long shifts and tired eyes and bills stacked on kitchen counters. It’s four children and never enough hours in the day and parents who love hard but quietly, in practical ways that don’t always translate into closeness.

Josh sees it all the time.
The way his mother comes home already worn thin by the world, kicking off her shoes by the door with this tiny sigh she probably doesn’t even realise she makes. The way his father rubs at his face at the dinner table like he’s trying to physically push through fatigue. The way conversations in the house are always moving around schedules; who needs picking up, who forgot lunch money, who’s working late again.

Everything is motion.
Everything is survival.
And somewhere inside all that movement, Josh learns how to make himself smaller.
Not intentionally at first.
He just notices how easy it is for concern to get swallowed by exhaustion.

The first time his mother saw the white bandages wrapped around his right arm, her eyes stayed there a second too long.
Josh remembers that part clearly.
Not panic. Not accusation.
Just this quiet pause.
A flicker of something heavy passing across her face before she looked away again, like she didn’t know whether asking would open a conversation she didn’t have the strength to hold together.

“What happened there?” she’d asked eventually, voice careful.
And Josh had answered too quickly. Too casually. Some flimsy explanation he can’t even remember now because the lie itself mattered less than the relief that came after it was accepted, ir at least not challenged.

His mother nodded slowly, but her expression didn’t fully settle afterwards. The sadness lingered around her eyes the rest of the evening like something she kept almost returning to before stopping herself.
Josh noticed that too.
He notices everything.

The same thing happened with his father months later, when the plaster stretched across Josh’s palm and he brushed it off as a burn from cooking.
His dad had looked at him for a moment longer than normal.
Not suspicious.
Just… sad.
Like he was standing in front of a door he knew existed but didn’t know how to open.

And Josh hated that look more than anger would’ve hurt.
Because it carried this awful sense of helplessness with it. Like his parents could tell something inside him was slipping out of reach, but life kept moving too fast for them to stop and hold onto it properly.

That’s the thing Josh can never quite explain, even to himself.
His parents love him.
He knows they do.

Their love exists in packed lunches and rides to school and reminders to text when he gets somewhere safely, in washed clothes folded outside his bedroom door. In his mother buying his favourite cereal when it’s on sale because she remembered offhandedly that he liked it, in his father falling asleep on the couch because he worked overtime again.

The love is there.
But it’s buried underneath exhaustion and timing and all the ordinary tragedies of adulthood that slowly erode people without anyone noticing.
And Josh starts convincing himself that needing more than that is selfish.

Because they’re trying.
They really are.
So instead of saying anything real, he gets better at hiding it. Better at pulling sleeves down. Better at answering questions before they fully form. Better at smiling just enough to redirect concern into something manageable.

He tells himself he’s protecting them from it.
But deep down, there’s another truth sitting underneath that one.
A quieter, more painful truth.
That part of him no longer fully believes there’s room for his pain inside the life this family is already struggling to hold together.

Jordan tried.
For a long time, he really did.
Not in the way adults try, with careful questions and worried glances and conversations that circle around the truth without ever quite touching it. Jordan’s attempts were smaller than that. Simpler. The kind of love only siblings know how to give, completely earnest, completely unguarded.

Back when they were both younger, Jordan would push open Josh’s bedroom door without knocking and climb onto the end of the bed like it belonged to him too. He’d sit cross-legged with a blanket tangled around his legs while some movie played too quietly in the background, neither of them really watching it.

Sometimes they barely spoke.
Just the occasional comment muttered into the dark.
“This part’s dumb.”
“You’ve seen this one like ten times.”
“Move, your foot’s literally on me.”
Little meaningless things.

But Josh remembers how those nights used to soften something inside him anyway. Because Jordan didn’t come in looking at him like he was fragile. He didn’t stare too long or ask loaded questions or act careful in that unbearable way people do when they think sadness might break if they touch it wrong.
He just sat there.
Like being near Josh was the easiest thing in the world.

And when they were kids, Jordan used to make him things. Tiny stick-figure drawings on printer paper with crooked lettering stretched across the top in bright marker:
I love yoy Josh.
The stick figures always had ridiculous smiles. One time Jordan drew them holding lightsabers for absolutely no reason. Another had a dog that looked more like a melting loaf of bread.

Josh kept every single one.
Because every time Jordan handed him one of those crumpled pages, it felt painfully genuine in a way almost nothing else did. Like his brother saw he was hurting and responded with the only tools he had available to him: crayons, misspelled words, and uncomplicated love.
And Josh would cry afterwards sometimes.
Not loudly. Never where Jordan could see.
Just quietly, alone later that night, staring at childish drawings that somehow made him feel more understood than most conversations ever had.

Because Jordan loved him so openly back then.
Without hesitation.
Without exhaustion.
Without that careful distance people develop when they don’t know what to do with someone else’s sadness anymore.

But people grow up.
And growing up means realising love is not the same thing as understanding.
Jordan got older. School got harder. Friends became important. His world widened while Josh’s kept shrinking inward. And eventually those nights in Josh’s room became less frequent.
Not suddenly.
Just slowly enough that neither of them could point to when it changed.

A missed movie night here. A distracted conversation there. Jordan lingering less in doorways. Spending more time downstairs. More time laughing into gaming headsets with friends Josh had never met.
And Josh noticed all of it.
Of course he did.

He noticed when Jordan stopped asking if he wanted company. Not because he stopped caring, Josh knows that somewhere deep down, but because trying to reach someone who never really reaches back starts to wear a person down after enough years.

Especially when you’re young.
Especially when you don’t fully understand why your brother seems permanently unreachable no matter how gently you knock on the door.

So eventually, Jordan stopped trying so hard.
And Josh told himself he understood.
Told himself it was inevitable.
Told himself people can only stand outside a locked room for so long before they assume nobody’s coming out.

But understanding it didn’t stop the loneliness.
If anything, it made it worse.
Because now the silence between them carried history inside it. Memories of all the times Jordan had tried, all the small offerings of love Josh hadn’t known how to hold onto properly because he’d been too consumed by surviving himself.

Sometimes Josh catches glimpses of his brother in passing, laughing at something on his phone, rushing out the door, calling a quick goodbye over his shoulder, and it hits him all at once that Jordan is growing up without him now.
Not physically.
But emotionally.

Like there’s an entire version of Jordan’s life unfolding somewhere just out of Josh’s reach.
And maybe the most painful part is knowing it’s nobody’s fault entirely.

Not Jordan’s.
Not even really Josh’s.
Just time. Exhaustion. Distance. Sadness left untreated for too long until it settles into the walls of a house and teaches everyone living there how to move around it instead of through it.

Josh’s grades don’t collapse all at once they erode. Slowly enough that at first it just looks like tiredness. A missing homework assignment here, a half-finished project there. Teachers start writing the same comments over and over across the tops of tests:
Not meeting potential.
Distracted in class.
Needs to apply himself.

As if effort is the problem. As if he isn’t already exhausting himself just trying to remain upright through the day.

By the time he’s staying awake until three in the morning most nights, sleep stops feeling like rest and starts feeling like something he fails at repeatedly. He lies in bed with his headphones on and his laptop balanced against bent knees, the glow of the screen bleaching his room blue while his mind refuses to quiet down long enough for unconsciousness to take him gently.

Thoughts move through him in loops.
Not dramatic ones, most of the time. Just relentless ones.
Everything he said wrong that day. Everything he didn’t say. The unbearable feeling that everyone else was born with some instinct for being alive that he somehow missed entirely.
Hours disappear like that.

Then morning comes anyway.
And he drags himself to school feeling hollowed out from the inside, eyes burning, limbs heavy enough to ache. Sometimes he falls asleep in class without meaning to. His head dips for a second during lectures and suddenly someone is saying his name sharply from the front of the room while twenty pairs of eyes turn toward him.
He mumbles an apology.
Everyone looks away again.

The humiliation lingers much longer than the moment itself what scares him most is how invisible all of it seems to be, because from the outside, he still looks functional enough.

He still smiles automatically when someone looks at him. Still laughs when expected. Still says “I’m fine” with enough practiced ease that nobody thinks to question it.

And when he misses an entire week of school, the world keeps moving with this horrible indifference that confirms every fear he already had about himself.
No flood of messages.
No where are you?
Just one or two casual check-ins about assignments from people who probably would’ve asked anyone.

When he finally comes back, nobody reacts like someone returning from disappearance, there’s no pause in conversation, no shift in atmosphere. His classmates grin at him in the hallway like he’d only been gone a day.

“Hey, man.”
“Thought you were sick.”
“You missed the test.”
Josh smiles back because that’s what people do.
And standing there in the fluorescent blur of the corridor, he realises something awful:
They genuinely don’t know.
Not because they’re cruel.
Because pain this private leaves no obvious outline for other people to trace.

They don’t know he wakes up exhausted before the day has even started. They don’t know the shower burns sometimes, that standing under hot water feels less like cleaning himself and more like being forced to exist physically after spending hours trying not to feel anything at all.
They don’t know there are nights where he sits on the bathroom floor afterwards, staring at the tiles because he can’t quite gather the energy to stand back up immediately.

They don’t know because he never tells them.
And part of him resents that.part of him wants someone to look at him one time and simply know. To see through the careful smiles and automatic responses and realise there’s a person underneath all of it quietly coming apart.
But another part of him is terrified of that too.
Because what if someone finally noticed and still didn’t know what to do?

What if being seen changed nothing at all?

Josh was fourteen the first time things inside him became too heavy for him to carry alone.
Not in the dramatic, cinematic way people imagine afterwards when they try to reconstruct tragedy into something understandable. There was no final speech, no note folded carefully beneath a pillow, no sense of certainty

Just exhaustion. The kind that builds slowly over years until a person stops being able to imagine a future version of themselves that feels any different from the one they’re trapped in now.

That night, the house was quiet in the ordinary way families become quiet after midnight. Pipes creaking softly in the walls. The low hum of the refrigerator downstairs. Jordan asleep in the next room, probably sprawled sideways across his bed like he always used to be.

Everything looked painfully normal. Josh remembers that part most clearly afterwards.

How the world didn’t shift to match what he was feeling. How nothing outside him reflected the magnitude of what was happening inside his head.

He just felt unbearably tired.
Tired enough that his thoughts stopped sounding frightening and started sounding logical in the way dangerous things sometimes do when someone has been hurting for too long.
Afterwards, he barely remembers falling asleep.
What he remembers is waking up.

The shock of consciousness returning violently instead of peacefully. His body aching. His throat burning. The room spinning hard enough to make panic cut through the fog for the first time all night.

He remembers the smell first. Then the sight of himself afterwards, sick, shaking, disoriented, the awful physical reality of what pain had turned into when it stopped being abstract and became something frighteningly real.

And beneath all of it, stronger than anything else, there was fear.
Not poetic sadness.
Not relief.
Fear.

Because in that moment, lying there alone in the dim light of early morning, Josh realised he hadn’t actually wanted violence or suffering or death in the cinematic way his thoughts sometimes framed it. He had wanted the pain in his head to stop consuming every part of him.

But instead he was still there. Still alive. Still hurting. Only now terrified too.
And the strangest thing was how normal everything felt by the next evening.

His family moved through the house unaware. Conversations about work and school and groceries continued around him exactly the same way they always had. Nobody asked the right questions, or maybe they didn’t know how.

His mother frowned briefly when she realised medication was missing, his father commented once about him looking pale, there were moments where concern hovered near the surface of things, but never long enough to fully settle into confrontation.

And Josh, already drowning in shame by then, helped smooth over every loose edge before anyone could pull at it too hard.

Excuses came easier than honesty, a nosebleed, feeling sick, not sleeping well.
He watched his parents accept those explanations with the exhausted trust of people trying desperately to believe their child is okay because the alternative feels too enormous to hold inside an already overfull life and afterwards, the silence around it became part of him.

Not because the night stopped mattering.
But because he learned something dangerous from surviving it unnoticed: That a person could be falling apart completely while the world continued to treat them as functional.

School still happened. Dinner still happened. Morning still came, and Josh carried the memory of that night quietly inside himself after that, not as something romantic or beautiful, but as something deeply lonely. A moment where he came frighteningly close to disappearing and realised afterwards that pain had isolated him so thoroughly he hadn’t known how to ask anyone to help him stay.

Josh doesn’t actually believe in “beautiful tragedy,” not really. That idea only shows up when everything else feels too unbearable to hold directly.

It’s a kind of mental shorthand his brain reaches for when the real feeling is too raw to sit with: the exhaustion, the self-disgust, the loneliness that doesn’t soften even when people are physically nearby. The way he can’t quite reconcile existing in a body that keeps getting him through days he doesn’t feel present for.
At eighteen, he’s learned how to live around it, but not through it.

That’s the part that never changes. The thoughts still come in the same looping, persuasive way they always have, especially at night, when the world stops pushing back. They don’t sound like commands so much as arguments his brain keeps repeating, trying to find a version of reality where the pain makes sense, where there’s an ending that feels clean instead of endless.
And sometimes his mind tries to turn that into something softer than it is.

But the reality underneath it is much less poetic.
It’s exhaustion that never fully resets with sleep. It’s waking up already behind. It’s looking at himself and not recognising the person other people are reacting to. It’s the gap between how much effort it takes just to exist and how little of that effort anyone else can see.

And that gap is where the dangerous thoughts grow, not because they’re true, but because they promise relief in a way nothing else in his life currently does.

The truth is, nothing about him being “not like the pretty ones” is relevant in the way his mind is making it feel. That comparison is just another way his brain tries to assign value to suffering, like pain has to be justified by appearance or story or how it might be perceived from the outside.

But pain doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t become more valid if it looks a certain way, and it doesn’t become more bearable if it feels narratively fitting.
It just hurts.

And Josh is stuck in the part where it hurts, and where he hasn’t yet found anything steady enough outside of himself to interrupt that loop when it starts convincing him there’s only one direction left.

People told him it got better. They said it like it was a guarantee. Like time was a clean upward line and not something messy and uneven that loops back on itself when you’re not looking. Like healing was something that arrived eventually, uninvited but certain, if you just stayed alive long enough to collect it.

Josh never believed them, because inside his head, nothing had ever felt like it was quietly improving in the background. If anything, it felt like he’d just gotten better at functioning while it stayed the same underneath, like learning how to walk with something heavy strapped to his back and calling it progress because he stopped falling over.

So he stopped listening to people who said it out loud. Stopped waiting for the “better” part to arrive.

He assumed some people were just built in a way that allowed them to outgrow things, and others weren’t. That maybe his brain just didn’t do that. Didn’t reset. Didn’t soften. Just kept replaying the same patterns until they felt like personality instead of pain.

That was easier to believe, in a strange way.
Because it meant there wasn’t something he was failing to do correctly.

Just something wrong with the way he was.
And then, quietly, without announcing itself as important, someone else entered his orbit.

Just a boy with a ukulele in a place that felt too big and too indifferent most of the time, like Midwestern Ohio was full of empty spaces people learned to fill with noise or music or anything that made the silence less sharp.

He wasn’t dramatic about Josh’s sadness. He didn’t try to dissect it or name it or turn it into something manageable. He just… stayed near it without flinching away immediately.
Which, for Josh, was unfamiliar.

Most people either stepped carefully around him or stepped away entirely, this boy didn’t do either.

He’d sit on the edge of things, doorframes, benches, borrowed moments between obligations,and play soft, imperfect chords like he wasn’t trying to impress anyone, just fill the air with something that didn’t demand anything back.

And Josh didn’t understand it at first. He kept waiting for the moment it would shift. For the awkward question. The careful concern. The distance that usually followed any attempt at closeness.

But it didn’t come in the same way.
Instead, there were small, ordinary moments that didn’t ask to be interpreted as anything life-changing while they were happening.
A song hummed under breath without explanation. A shared silence that didn’t feel like exclusion. A conversation that drifted sideways instead of digging inward too fast.

And something in Josh, something that had gotten used to bracing for impact, started to hesitate.

Not heal or suddenly transform. Just hesitate.
Because it turned out that “getting better,” if it was happening at all, didn’t feel like a switch flipping or a problem being solved.

It felt more like noticing, for the first time in a long time, that not every moment was unbearable.

That there were pockets of time where the thoughts didn’t completely win the room.

And the boy with the ukulele didn’t cause that.
He didn’t undo years of pain or rewrite what Josh had already lived through.
But he did something quieter than that.
He made space. Space where Josh wasn’t only defined by what hurt. Space where silence didn’t automatically belong to spiralling thoughts. Space where being seen didn’t immediately turn into being analysed or avoided.

And for someone like Josh, who had learned to equate love with either distance or exhaustion, that kind of presence was almost harder to believe in than absence.

Because loving another person, really, simply, without needing to fully understand why, was easier than fixing himself had ever been.
Not because it solved him.

But because it interrupted the idea that he had to disappear inside himself in order to be bearable.