I. The Girl Who Forgot How to Feel

Out on the edge of a quiet, dying town, where the streetlights buzzed without conviction, she hid in a house that was quietly collapsing around her.

The place belonged to another addict. He barely moved, a hollow man with yellow eyes, sunken cheeks, and breath that rasped like death was near. She stayed because no one cared enough to make her leave. Here, she was a nobody among nobodies. In this town, people didn’t knock unless they wanted something.

She was crouched on the stained carpet, the dim light from a crooked lamp casting long shadows across the floor as she sat fully absorbed in her craft. Her small hands shook as she worked in quick, practiced motions that told me she’d done this so many times it had become second nature. Her hair hung over her face, limp and unwashed, and when she lifted her head, her violet eyes looked glassed-over.

She whispered something before the needle touched her skin. It might have been a prayer, or an apology. Maybe both. The sound barely reached her own ears.

Each night was the same. The lighter. The cord. The trembling that soon followed. Her movements were mechanical, as if she’d forgotten there was ever a reason behind them. Sometimes she laughed at nothing. Sometimes she stared at the wall as her frown deepened and her lips began to quiver. Once, she started crying, soft and soundless, as her body folded in on itself like she was trying to disappear.

She told the man on the couch that it was her fault her brother was gone. He didn’t answer. She said she just wanted to stop thinking about him. That she was tired of remembering. Tired of feeling. Then she went quiet again.

It had been raining incessantly for days. The water ran through the cracks in the ceiling, dripping into bowls and pots that she never emptied. She didn’t leave the house once, just stared outside the living room window for hours, unmoving. Tonight, I watched as she staggered toward the bathroom—maybe to wash her face, maybe to look at herself in the mirror long enough to hate what she saw. She didn’t make it. She collapsed beside the tub, her cheek pressed to the cold tile, her breath shuddering once before sleep took her under.

Then the train came through—always at the same time, always too loud for this dying place. The walls trembled. The lights flickered. She didn’t wake. But something in her shifted, the way a sleeper flinches at a voice they recognize from another life.

Every one of her worlds blurs into the next. The same decay. The same slow collapse. Watching her after all this time is like being high myself: detached, drifting, suspended between purpose and meaninglessness.

By the time the rain stopped, I was packed up and ready to move on. There was nothing else to learn here, only another ending that had already started. Before I left, I sent my findings to the Sha’harai.

The search continues.

M.

Up next: The Girl Who Loved Alone