Chapter 4: Quiet Symptoms

Doctor Sally never hurried to pin a name on what was happening to me.

That restraint, more than anything, unsettled me in a way I couldn’t quite pinpoint. Most adults I’d known wanted quick answers. She seemed content to let the silence do some of the work.

When I returned for the second appointment, the room felt familiar now. This time, her questions were sharper and more deliberate. She asked how often I woke up already exhausted. How many weeks does the emptiness had been there. Whether I ever felt like I was floating slightly outside my own body, observing myself go through the motions. Whether sounds felt muffled, or colors less vivid.

I answered with the same careful honesty as before...

She took fewer notes this session. Mostly, she simply watched me as if she were listening to something beneath my words.

When the hour drew to a close, she set her pen down, folded her hands in her lap, and spoke in the same measured tone she always used.

“Abel,” she said softly, “have you ever heard the word depression used for something more than just feeling sad?”

I nodded slowly. I’d read about it. Seen the posters in the university wellness center.

“It doesn’t always announce itself with tears or dramatic despair,” she went on. “Sometimes it arrives quietly. As numbness. As a disappearance of appetite, of energy, of interest. Sometimes it feels like watching your own life on a screen, close enough to see, too far to touch. Like the volume has been turned down on everything.”

Her description didn’t jolt me. It didn’t feel like a revelation. It simply settled over me, familiar and heavy, like a coat I’d been wearing for months without realizing it was weighing me down.

She wasn’t declaring anything. She wasn’t writing a prescription or slapping a label across my forehead. She was laying out a possibility, carefully, the way someone might set a fragile object on a table and inviting me to look at it without forcing me to pick it up.

“I’d like us to keep meeting,” she said. “Weekly, if you’re willing. And between now and next time, I’d like you to try a few small things. Eat one full meal a day no skipping, even if you don’t feel hungry. Step outside once, even for ten minutes. Sit in the air. Notice the temperature on your skin. And if the heaviness starts pressing in, don’t lock the door and disappear. Leave it open, even a crack.”

I nodded again.

“I’ll also check in with your parents,” she added. “Not about anything you’ve shared in here, that stays private. Just enough to let them know you’re working on some things and could use gentle support.”

Support.

The word echoed strangely in my mind, like a foreign language I recognized but couldn’t quite translate into feeling.

After that appointment, Blake vanished entirely from the edges of my life.

No chance encounters. No unread messages lighting up my phone. No secondhand gossip drifting through mutual acquaintances. It was as though he had drawn a clean, deliberate line and stepped completely across it.

Part of me felt a quiet relief at the absence of tension, the absence of possibility.

Another part registered a new, subtler absence like a room you didn’t realize was echoing until the furniture was removed.

University carried on around me, indifferently.

That was when the rumors about Charlie and Casey began.

Charlie had apparently decided to stop circling and start pursuing in earnest. He walked Casey to early lectures. Waited outside lecture halls with two coffees in hand. Claimed the seat beside him in group study sessions, leaning in to explain things with that easy, confident smile.

Exactly as the original story had scripted it.

I felt no surprise. No twist in my gut. I had known this scene was coming...

This time, though, something shifted inside me. I stopped loving Charlie.

Or perhaps, more accurately, I finally gave myself permission to let the feeling go.

I no longer tracked his schedule in my peripheral vision. I stopped noting which routes he took across campus, which tables he favored in the library. When I passed him laughing with Casey outside the arts building, I simply turned my eyes forward and kept walking.

There was no sting of jealousy. No bitter ache. Only a clean, widening distance.

The days settled into a new rhythm.

Morning classes. Afternoon assignments completed in the quiet corner of the library. Evenings spent picking at dinner until I remembered Doctor Sally’s request and forced down at least one complete plate. Weekly sessions where I reported my small efforts and she listened without judgment. My parents hovering at the edges of my awareness, watching, worrying, but respecting the space I’d carved out.

I functioned. Adequately. Predictably.

Some nights, when the dorm was silent and the dark pressed in from all sides, my mind drifted toward Blake.

I wondered if he was eating properly. I wondered if he deliberately avoided the café we used to sit in, the park path we once walked without speaking.

The thoughts came and went like passing clouds. I never reached for my phone to check his socials. I never asked anyone how he was.

Some emotions, I was learning, could live quietly in the background without ever needing to be fed or acted upon.

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