Azarez opened his eyes to a bedroom that felt like the inside of a lung—dark, wet, and heaving.Cold sweat slid from his hairline to the hinge of his jaw, following the same path it had traced every night for a decade, as if the dream itself had worn a groove into his skin. He did not wake so much as escape, clawing up through layers of sleep that clung like cotton to a wound. The ceiling fan above him spun too slowly; each blade hesitated at the top of its arc, breathing, listening.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and the mattress exhaled a sigh that sounded like his name—Azarez—spoken by someone who had never possessed a real existance outside his sight The drawer shrieked when he pulled it. Inside, the pill bottle rolled toward his fingers as though it had been waiting. Childproof cap, foil seal, the reassuring rattle of chemistry. He shook four capsules into his palm, counted them like rosary beads, then added a fifth for the hunger he could never name. The water glass shook; the surface trembled, concentric circles racing outward—little life rafts for thoughts he refused to save.

“Go away,” he whispered to the dark. The dark had shoulders; it leaned against his back the way a person would cling to someone's back for a carry, head cocked in the imitation of interest.

Ten years ago they had called it imaginary, then puberty, then psychotic break. The doctors spoke in pastel verbs: manage, cope, adjust. They asked him to draw the figure on crisp white paper. He drew negative space—an outline of nothing, edges scalloped like bacteria seen through a microscope. They nodded as if that proved progress.

He was thirteen. The first time the voice suggested harm, it did so politely, as if offering a mint. He pressed palms to ears, shook his head like a dog shedding water, and the suggestion slid off him, or seemed to. Weeks later the scissors were in his hand, handle hot, the blades already singing. When his mother’s eyes widened, he saw them fill not with fear but with calculation—she was cataloguing explanations, alibis, childhood myths. Then came the blood, less than he expected, more than the world could forgive. The day when {{user}}, who they called just a figment of his creative imagination while playing tea party at 6 back then, had whispered something that resulted in him spending time in rehab.

They locked the scissors away, then the knives, then finally him.

Rehab smelled of copper and lavender. Therapists wore lanyards the color of melted sherbet. They taught him breathing exercises: four counts in, hold seven, release eight. During the exhale {{user}} recited the syllables with him, synchronizing breath until Azarez could not tell which lungs were failing. Hours folded like paper fans; night was day with the bulb burned out. In the common room a television played nature documentaries on loop. Antelopes fell to lions, sea turtles misplaced their nests, galaxies collided in silence. Whenever prey bolted, Azarez felt fingernails brush the nape of his neck—encouragement, applause.

Azarez’s tongue probed the backs of his teeth, counting them like a prison parolee checking belongings. Twenty-seven still; good. “I’d manage,” he said, though the qualifier sounded hollow, a drum made of skin without wood.

He sat very still, listening to the house settle into an expectant hush—the hush not of silence but of held breath. In the hallway the overhead bulb flared, died, flared, died, creating a Morse code he could almost read. His pulse slowed, aligning to whatever rhythm the house now kept. Somewhere outside, a dog barked once—sharp, punitive—then nothing.