My girlfriend used to be my entire world. I would have given her anything. I loved her to the point of tearing myself open, emptying out every piece of who I was just to keep her warm. Yet she told me my love was suffocating. She told me she couldn’t stand the sight of me. Crippled by severe depression, I broke down, begging on my knees. “Audrey, please come home. I love you so much. I can’t survive without you.” “I was wrong. I won’t ever ask why you went to that motel with him again. You two can stay together as long as you want, okay?” “I’ll stop checking on you. Just don’t break up with me. Just come back and see me once in a while, please?” “Audrey… I’m dying…” She ignored my cries for help, choosing instead to lose herself in the arms of the boy she called her untouchable first love. And when I finally died, when the undeniable truth was laid bare before her, she collapsed into the dirt, weeping, begging to follow me into the grave. 1 The apartment was too big. It was silent, cavernous, and cold. On the kitchen table sat the dinner I had made the night before—four dishes and a pot of soup, all of Audrey’s favorites, now congealed beneath a film of grease. We had screamed at each other last night. Rather, she had screamed, slammed the front door so hard the frame rattled, and hailed a cab into the rain. I had spent the entire night sitting in that exact wooden chair. It was the same routine every time we fought. She would screen my calls, leaving me in agonizing limbo until her mood shifted and she felt like tossing me a few breadcrumbs of attention. By morning, on my third attempt, the line finally clicked open. “Do you ever stop?” Audrey’s voice was sharp, grating with sheer irritation. “Call after call after call. You’re driving me insane, Daniel!” A breath I hadn’t realized I was holding shuddered out of my chest. I kept my tone as soft, as non-threatening as possible. “I was terrified something happened to you. If you hadn’t picked up, I was going to call the police.” “The police?” she scoffed, her pitch rising. “I go where I want. Since when do you own me? You know what, Daniel? Your love is genuinely suffocating. I can’t breathe around you anymore. God forbid I go out with a friend to blow off some steam!” “I’m sorry,” I whispered, the words slipping out like an ingrained reflex. “It’s my fault. Please forgive me.” “Your fault? What exactly are you sorry for?” There was a cruel, triumphant lilt in her voice. “Go on. List them out for me. Let’s see how genuinely remorseful you actually are.” I squeezed my eyes shut, swallowing the hot salt gathering in my throat, and forced a hollow laugh. “I shouldn’t have questioned why you got a room with him. I shouldn’t have asked why you took a weekend trip behind my back. I’m sorry for picking a fight over it. I’m sorry for holding on so tight. Audrey, baby… I was wrong. Please don’t leave me. As long as you come home, I’ll do whatever you want.” “Oh, stop it!” Her voice suddenly pulled away from the receiver, turning soft, coy, and playful. “I’m on the phone, quit messing around…” A man’s low, throaty chuckle rumbled in the background. My chest caved in. I knew that voice. It was Garrett Stone. Her high school sweetheart. The golden boy she never truly let go of—the mythical first love who had allegedly saved her life back in grade school. Ever since he had reappeared in her life a few months ago, I had become an invisible ghost in my own relationship. There was no room left for me in her heart. But… we had been together for three whole years. Three years of devotion, against the single month she had dated Garrett as a teenager. Why couldn’t three years of my life leave even a scratch on the pedestal she built for him? “Audrey,” I pleaded, my voice trembling with humiliation. “The temperature’s dropping today. You were barely wearing anything when you ran out last night. Where are you? Let me drive over and bring you a coat.” “Don’t bother,” she snapped, her tone instantly hardening. Before she could hang up, Garrett’s voice drifted through the line, smug and smooth. “Don’t sweat it, Daniel. She’s wearing my jacket. Your girl is being taken very good care of.” He leaned hard on the words taken care of. They both burst into a shared, breathless laugh—the kind of laughter that belongs only to people sharing an intimate secret. I didn’t dare press further. I was terrified of making her angry. “Whatever, Daniel. I don’t have time to waste on you,” Audrey said impatiently. “Garrett and I are heading out. Think about what you’ve done for the next few days. Whether we break up or not depends entirely on your behavior.” Click. The line went dead. Buzz. A text banner slid down my screen. [Dr. Lindqvist: Daniel, how have you been feeling over the last six months? You were showing so much progress during our last session. Come in for a follow-up when you have time. Are you keeping up with your medication?] My psychiatrist. Ever since I was seventeen, ever since I watched the flashing red lights reflect off the mangled wreckage that took both of my parents in an instant, severe depression had sunk its claws into me. Dr. Lindqvist had been patient and thorough, constantly reminding me to take my pills. When I first met Audrey, the fog began to clear. I smiled more; the world took on color. Dr. Lindqvist had even told me that I was on the brink of a full recovery. Yet sitting there now, my left hand gripped my chest through my shirt. A sharp, tearing agony radiated behind my ribs, starving my lungs of oxygen. I gasped for air, dragging ragged breaths through my teeth, but the panic crashed over me like black, freezing water. My depression—that monstrous black dog—had never left. It had only been waiting in the dark. Healing? It was all a lie. I didn’t reply to Dr. Lindqvist. I simply slid off the chair, curling into a tight, trembling ball on the hardwood floor, letting the suffocating grief drown me whole. 2 There was a time when Audrey was the sun. She was the singular, radiant force that pulled me out of my personal darkness. She used to pout playfully, leaning up on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek. “You can’t just stay cooped up in the dark, Daniel. I’m taking you out into the world!” “So what if you don’t have many friends? I’m your best friend and your girlfriend. I’m all you need.” She took me camping under open skies, dragged me to bustling street fairs, and walked me through crowded amusement parks I had always been too terrified to enter. Whenever the sensory overload made my hands shake, she would interlock her fingers with mine, squeezing tight. “It’s okay. I’m right here. I’m never letting go.” She was the person who whispered a thousand promises of forever into my skin. Yet in the span of a single month, every word out of her mouth had turned to poison. “Stop hovering around me. Don’t you have a life of your own?” “I don’t want to go anywhere with you. You’re completely exhausting.” “Daniel, you are sickeningly needy.” She spat those words at me with eyes that once held the universe, now overflowing with undisguised revulsion. Every sacred vow we had made in the dark had withered into a grotesque joke. My phone chimed with a custom alert. It was an Instagram notification—Audrey had posted a new story to her close-friends list, which I was still on. My heart seized the moment the image loaded. It was a photo of two hands, tightly intertwined against the backdrop of an endless, sapphire-blue ocean. I recognized that small, pale hand instantly. The delicate ring finger, which used to wear the diamond promise ring I bought with three months of savings, was bare. All that remained was a faint, pale indentation where the metal had rested. We had planned to sign our marriage license by the end of the year. Her caption read: To find you again—I won’t waste this lifetime. I knew that stretch of coastline, too. It was the quiet cove in Maine where we had first confessed our feelings. It was the place we returned to every single year to celebrate our anniversary. With shaking fingers, I dialed her number, clinging to the final, pathetic shred of hope left in my chest. “What do you want now?” she answered, her voice dripping with venom. “Are you calling to throw another tantrum about my post?” “No… I won’t fight with you about it. I promise,” I whispered. This wasn’t the first time. Every time she went somewhere with Garrett, she posted these ambiguous, romantic snippets. Meanwhile, any trace of me had been scrubbed clean from her feed months ago. Our mutual friends had already started privately asking if we had quietly split up. “Then what is it?” “Do you… do you know what tomorrow is?” I asked gently. Silence hung on the line for a beat. Tomorrow was our third anniversary. The person standing beside her on that beach should have been me. “I know,” she scoffed coldly. “So what? Given how completely unhinged you’ve been acting lately, did you honestly expect me to celebrate with you? Let’s just skip it this year.” She hung up. A ragged, broken laugh tore from my throat as tears spilled down my cheeks. I had been foolish enough to believe that she went to our beach because tomorrow was our anniversary. I had convinced myself that she was just acting out, waiting for me to drive up, apologize, and sweep her into my arms. It was nothing more than my own pathetic delusion. Still, I needed one last answer. I needed to see it with my own eyes. I threw a change of clothes into a duffel bag. After a moment of hesitation, I grabbed the amber bottle of prescription sedatives from the medicine cabinet. They were heavy tranquilizers meant to knock me out when the panic attacks kept me staring at the ceiling until dawn. I had truly believed I would never need them again. An hour and a half later, I was standing on the windswept shore. The salt air stung my eyes. In the crashing surf, I could almost see the ghosts of who we used to be—walking barefoot along the tide line, laughing, believing our happiness would outlast the world. I checked into the boutique coastal inn where we always stayed. Just as I pulled out my phone to text her the room number, the elevator doors at the end of the lobby slid open. Audrey stepped out, her hand tucked firmly into Garrett’s, laughing at something he had just murmured into her ear. The blood drained from my face. The moment her eyes landed on me, her smile vanished, replaced by an expression of pure disgust. “What the hell are you doing here? Daniel, your sick obsession is out of control! Did you seriously track me down?” “I just… I came to ask for your forgiveness,” I stammered, forcing a fragile, pleading smile as I reached into my coat pocket. I pulled out a small velvet box—the vintage sapphire pendant she had pointed out in a jeweler’s window months ago. “Happy third anniversary, Audrey.” She didn’t even glance at it. With a violent sweep of her arm, she slapped the box out of my hand. The velvet case hit the hardwood floor, springing open. The delicate silver chain snapped on impact, the blue stone skittering across the floorboards. “Forgiveness for what? You stalked me to my hotel!” Audrey shrieked, drawing the stares of the front-desk staff. “I am completely, utterly done! I’ve told you a hundred times that Garrett and I are just friends, and you still can’t stop hovering like a paranoid freak! What is wrong with you?” She leaned down, her face contorted with rage. “I can’t take this anymore. We’re through.” 3 The words hit me like a physical blow. My knees gave out, and I hit the floor with a dull thud. “No… please, Audrey, don’t do this,” I gasped, reaching out to grasp the hem of her jeans. “I’m sorry. Just listen to me, I didn’t stalk you! It was an accident—you know this is our spot, we always stay here—” “Shut up!” The crack of her hand against my cheek echoed through the lobby. My head snapped sideways. The sting on my skin was nothing compared to the violent ringing in my ears. “Can you not comprehend English?” Audrey hissed, her boot coming down hard on the shattered sapphire necklace, grinding the stone into the floor. “Take your garbage and get out of my sight!” “I am sick of your constant, pathetic self-pity! Sick of your endless walking on eggshells, sick of your suffocating paranoia! Being around you is making me depressed!” She glared down at me, her eyes devoid of anything human. “Why don’t you just do the world a favor and go die, you psycho?” Garrett let out an amused, dismissive chuckle. He slid his arm casually around Audrey’s waist, pulling her flush against his side, and led her out into the ocean breeze. I don’t remember how I got back up to my room. The world had dissolved into static. My hands were shaking so violently that the keycard slipped twice before the lock finally chimed green. I collapsed against the closed door, fumbling the prescription bottle open. I dumped three white tablets into my palm and dry-swallowed them, desperate to shut off the screaming inside my skull. Ten minutes passed. “Why isn’t it working?” I sobbed into the dark room, clawing at my hair. “Why won’t it stop?” The pain wasn’t emotional anymore; it was an unbearable, tearing agony in my chest. The balcony railing outside looked so close. The drop to the rocky shoreline below seemed like the only quiet place left in the universe. Just end it. Tears blinded me as I picked up the bottle again, uncapped it, and tipped the entire contents into my mouth, swallowing the bitter pills in desperate, choking gulps. The overdose hit my nervous system like a sledgehammer. The room began to spin violently. My limbs turned to lead, my vision blurring into streaks of gray and black, and I crashed onto the carpet. Heave. My stomach seized, violently rejecting the lethal toxicity. My body tried desperately to vomit, fighting to purge the poison—an involuntary reflex of survival. But the heavy sedatives had already paralyzed my muscles. I couldn’t roll over. I couldn’t clear my throat. Most people who overdose on heavy tranquilizers don’t slip away in their sleep; they suffocate, drowning silently on their own regurgitation. A terrible, burning pressure filled my lungs. I gasped for air that wouldn’t come, tearing at the carpet with numb fingertips, until the agonizing pressure faded into a cold, endless silence. The world went pitch black. … I didn’t know how much time had passed when voices drifted through the dark. My consciousness floated upward. I opened my eyes—or rather, the essence of who I was looked downward. I saw Audrey. She was standing in a brightly lit hospital corridor, clutching a manila folder with trembling hands, staring at a psychiatric diagnostic chart in sheer disbelief. “He… he really had clinical depression? This isn’t some sick joke?” Her voice shook. “I thought he was just faking it to manipulate me… to guilt-trip me into staying!” Standing across from her was Dr. Lindqvist, his face like carved stone. “He was severely ill, Ms. Davis. Did you honestly never notice?” Dr. Lindqvist’s tone was frigid with quiet fury. “I thought you were the person helping him heal. I had no idea you were the one pushing him over the edge.” “Daniel’s greatest misfortune was falling in love with someone like you.” The doctor pulled a thick, folded envelope from his coat pocket and held it out. “This is his final letter. He started writing it the day he met you. Read it yourself.” Audrey took the envelope with shaking fingers and pulled out the pages. Within seconds, she began to shake her head violently. “No. No, this is impossible. This can’t be real!”
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