Tight
It is a common error to believe that loneliness sounds like silence. It does not. It sounds like drums — brutal, unrelenting — hammered out beneath a choir of screams, all of them trapped behind the bone of your own skull. The moment my eyes open, the noise is already there, ringing in my teeth, throbbing in the soft hollow behind my ears. I once believed that sleep might offer asylum, that my brain, in its temporary oblivion, could grant me a few hours of reprieve. How naive I was. The sound does not reside in the mind alone — it lives in the jaw I cannot unclench, the fists I cannot unfurl, the muscles that coil like serpents beneath my skin. It runs through my veins like a second bloodstream.
You would not recognize the person I was a few years ago. And if you imagine I have never searched for a cure, never begged for quiet, never crawled through every offered remedy like a man dying of thirst, then you have misjudged me entirely. I tried everything. Herbs. Pills. Therapists. Incantations. Escapes that left me more hollow than before. Some offered brief, fragile respites — glimmers of calm that evaporated the moment I reached for them — but nothing held. Nothing lasted.
Except, absurdly, my bathroom. I know how it sounds. Believe me, I know. But I speak only what I have lived.
It began the night my sibling locked me inside, their laughter echoing through the door like a dull percussion. The lights were off. The house lay silent in the small hours. I was alone in the dark, facing the mirror I could not see, and I decided, finally, to stop fighting. I surrendered myself to every terrible thought I had been holding at bay — I let them rise, let them swarm, let them have me. I stared into the black where my reflection should have been, and I allowed myself to imagine something staring back. Something standing just behind my shoulder, breathless and waiting. And then, impossibly, I felt relief. As if I had dissolved into my own darkness and become indistinguishable from it. There was nothing left to fear.
I did not want it to end. I wanted to remain there forever, suspended in that strange and merciful void.
It was then that I became aware of a presence. Not heavy or menacing — it was weightless, almost fragrant, like the color white rendered tangible. It moved along the floor, not through the air, as though it preferred the humility of the ground. I dared not look down. I held myself as still as a corpse, terrified that any motion would scatter it like ash. Then I felt it — a soft, smooth brush against my knuckle, then my knee, then my waist. Like heaven, tender and improbable, wrapping itself around me.
But it lasted only seconds. Then it was gone. The lights flicked on. The bathroom was vacant, ordinary, hollow.
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I wanted to scream. Instead, something sharper took root in me. I threatened my sibling — carefully, deliberately, with just enough cruelty — so that the next time, they would lock me in again, and for longer. It was the only way I could think to return.
It worked.
The second time, everything repeated — but this time, I felt the presence on my back, lingering, pressing with a gentle and unbearable weight. Then it coiled around my neck like wet silk kissing my skin. There is no feeling in the world that could rival that moment — no ecstasy, no agony, no pleasure sharp enough to compare. I stood in the dark, staring into the absent mirror, drowning in its tender grip, and I wanted more.
Then the switch clicked. The lights returned. And so did the drums, the echoes, the ceaseless screaming inside my head. I tried to summon it myself after that. I sat in the dark bathroom for hours, waiting, breath held, hope fragile as glass. But it was too clever. It would not come unless I was placed there by another hand. So I pushed my sibling to the edge of fury until, with our parents away in the countryside, they locked me in for an entire day.
I stood at the sink, pretending to wash my hands, listening for footsteps. Then the click. The relief flooded me like water through a broken dam. The presence came again. It climbed me slowly, softly, reaching my head at last. I felt its wings graze my legs but refused to move, refused even to breathe. It placed its hands on either side of my temples — and the chaos was lifted. Carried far, far away, as though it had never been. It healed me.
I grabbed it. I held it close, cradling it like something sacred, like dying and being reborn in the same shuddering breath. My mind could barely comprehend it, but it was real. It was there. I could feel its skin — like bubbles, like mist made solid, like moonlight given flesh — and I would not let go.
Then the walls began to close in. Slowly at first, then faster, pressing from all sides like the world tightening its grip. I heard its voice at my ear, murmuring something that sounded like music, like a forgotten language, like a promise. I nodded. I gave my permission.
Nearly ten hours later, the door swung open. The bathroom was empty. And where a boy once stood, searching for his reflection in the dark, there remained only the quiet hum of an unlit room — and the faint, fading warmth of something that had finally found its way home.
