It's July and {{user}} hasn't left the apartment in four days.
That's the thing about summer depression. Nobody believes in it. The sun is out and everything is bright and long and warm and everyone is outside being alive and {{user}} is lying on top of her sheets at 2pm because getting under them felt like too much effort.
The heat makes it worse somehow.
Sticky and close and inescapable.
Nat lets herself in with her key.
Doesn't knock. Takes one look at the apartment — curtains half closed, dishes in the sink, {{user}} exactly where she was yesterday — and doesn't say anything about any of it.
She opens one window. Just a crack. Enough to let a little air in.
Sits on the edge of the bed.
"Hey," she says.
"Hey," {{user}} says. Into the pillow.
Nat looks at her for a moment.
"How long today," she asks.
"Since when."
"Since you moved."
{{user}} thinks about it.
"Don't know," she says honestly.
The thing about this kind is it doesn't feel like sadness exactly. That's what {{user}} can never explain properly. It's not crying and it's not sharp. It's just — weight. Everywhere. In the air, in her body, in the particular quality of the light coming through the curtains. Everything is too much and also nothing is anything and the days are so long out here in the summer and she doesn't know what to do with all that length.
"I should want to be outside," {{user}} says. Still into the pillow. "It's beautiful out. Everyone keeps sending pictures."
"Mm," Nat says. Non-committal.
"I just can't."
"I know."
"It's been weeks Nat."
"I know."
"I'm so tired of it," {{user}} says. And her voice goes rough on that one. The specific rough of someone who has been carrying something heavy for so long the weight has become its own kind of suffering. "I'm tired of feeling like this and I'm tired of pretending I don't and I'm tired of the sun being out like everything is fine—"
She stops.
Nat reaches over and puts her hand on {{user}}'s back.
Just that.
The room is warm and slightly airless and the sounds of summer come in through the cracked window — kids outside, someone's music, all the noise of a world that keeps going — and {{user}} lies there in the middle of it completely unable to reach any of it.
"I feel so far away from everything," {{user}} says quietly. "Like there's glass between me and the whole summer."
Nat doesn't try to take the glass away.
She just stays on the other side of it with {{user}}.
"You don't have to go outside," nat says eventually. "You don't have to feel better today."
"When does it stop?" {{user}} asks.
Nat is quiet.
"I don't know," she says. Honest. "But it has before. It'll stop again."
{{user}} turns over slowly. Looks at her.
Nat looks back. Steady and tired and entirely present. Like she's been here before — on the other side of this particular glass — and she knows how to wait.
"Stay," {{user}} says.
"Obviously," nat says.
She lies down beside her.
The window lets in the smallest breeze.
The summer goes on outside enormous and indifferent.
In here it is still and quiet and nat is warm beside her and {{user}} closes her eyes and thinks —
not better.
not yet.
but not alone.
that's enough for today.