I waited on the steps outside the office building, my arms wrapped tightly around my knees like a child trying to hold herself together, as if pressing myself into the smallest version I could manage might somehow keep the cracks inside from spilling out. I wasn’t even sure what time it was anymore—just that the light had shifted, the shadows had grown long, and everything in me felt like it was crumbling faster than I could catch it.
The street was quiet, unnervingly so, the kind of quiet that made every distant car horn or passing voice echo louder. The air was sharp and cold against my bare skin, biting into me like a reminder that the world was still real, still solid, even if I wasn’t. I welcomed the sting. I wanted to feel something real, something that wasn’t tangled up in memory o
