I once believed emptiness was theatrical a word people reached for when they wanted to feel interesting in their own suffering. I imagined it as something loud, demonstrative, demanding witnesses. I was wrong. True emptiness is modest. It does not beg for attention. It works silently, dulling the edges of existence until everything feels fractionally incorrect, like a radio eternally misaligned with its station.
That morning, I woke before the alarm.
I lay still, staring at the cracked ceiling of my apartment as a thin blade of sunlight crept across it, advancing with patient indifference. I felt nothing toward the sight no irritation, no calm only a muted awareness that time was progressing, and that I was being carried along with it without my consent.
I rose because habit required it.
In the bathroom mirror, a familiar stranger stared back at me. Early twenties. Shadows beneath the eyes. A face suspended midway between intentions, as though I had abandoned the process of becoming someone halfway through. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, performed the necessary gestures with the accuracy of a machine following instructions it did not understand.
I did not despise my life. That was the most unsettling detail.
There was no catastrophe to indict, no singular wound to examine. No great injustice. Only the gradual sediment of ordinary days school, part-time work, sleep stacked neatly atop one another, leading nowhere in particular. Existence without arrival.
By the time I stepped outside, the city was already in motion.
Cars congested the streets, engines snarling with contained impatience. People passed one another with disciplined indifference, eyes tethered to phones, destinations, private urgencies I would never share. Everyone appeared to be going somewhere important, even when they were not.
I dissolved into them effortlessly.
That had always been my aptitude: presence without imprint. Not invisible merely unmemorable. The sort of person the eye acknowledges briefly before discarding.
As I walked, the familiar distance settled in. A thin, transparent partition between myself and everything else. Sounds arrived a fraction late. Colors seemed leached of conviction. Even my footsteps felt tentative, as though the ground required confirmation that I was real enough to support.
I wondered without distress, without hope whether something in me had malfunctioned.
The thought registered like a clerical note, filed and forgotten.
At the crosswalk, I stopped among the others. A woman beside me tapped her foot in irritation. A man behind me sighed loudly, offended by the delay. Somewhere in the distance, a siren cried and was swallowed by the city's noise.
The light remained red.
I watched the countdown, my mind drifting into its habitual vacancy not thinking, not feeling, merely occupying the space between thoughts.
Then something occurred.
At first, I dismissed it as imagination.
Sound vanished.
Not gradually. Not politely. One instant the city roared; the next, it was as though someone had erased noise from existence entirely. Cars continued moving. Mouths continued shaping words. But nothing accompanied their motions.
The silence was complete.
I sensed it before I understood it a pressure tightening in my chest, a weight gathering behind my eyes. The world seemed to hesitate, as if it had encountered a sentence it did not know how to finish.
No one else responded.
The woman kept tapping her foot. The man scrolled through his phone. Faces shifted. Lips moved. Nothing made a sound.
My pulse quickened.
I turned, suddenly alert in a way I had not been for months. Panic attempted to rise, but even it felt distant, blunted by the same numbness that had accompanied me for years.
This isn't real , I told myself.
Hallucination. Exhaustion. Anything less consequential than the truth.
Then the light turned green.
People stepped forward.
I stepped with them.
The moment my foot left the curb, the world stopped.
Not slowed.
Stopped.
The woman beside me hung suspended mid-motion, her hair lifted by a wind that no longer existed. A car in the intersection hovered impossibly still, its tires no longer acknowledging gravity. Above the street, a bird remained frozen in flight, wings extended, eyes vacant.
Only I could move.
The silence deepened, no longer empty but oppressive, pressing against my skull until it felt tangible. My breathing sounded obscene in the stillness the sole evidence that time still tolerated me.
I did not feel fear.
That absence terrified me more than terror ever could.
I raised my hand cautiously, half expecting resistance, as though the air itself had grown viscous. It moved freely. Everything else waited.
For me.
An unwanted thought surfaced.
So this is what it takes to be noticed.
Pain detonated behind my eyes.
Reality snapped back.
Sound collapsed over me horns shrieking, voices colliding, brakes screaming too close. Someone slammed into my shoulder, cursed, and continued on without pause.
I stumbled backward onto the sidewalk, heart hammering, lungs burning.
The city continued.
No one spared me a second glance.
I stood trembling, staring at my hands as if they belonged to someone else.
The glass between me and the world was gone.
What replaced it was far worse.
The certainty that reality had paused for me.
And the sinking knowledge that whatever had shifted inside me that morning had no intention of returning things to the way they were.