“i keep falling over i keep passing out what am i coming to? i am gonna melt down”

there are some people the world forgets without trying. they drift at the edge of notice, never quite unseen but never truly looked at. not loud enough to disturb, not broken enough to be saved. the city has a name for them, though it doesn’t speak it aloud — living corpse of a wasted life. not dead, not alive. just present. like background radiation. like static.

rm was one of them.

moving through city of black star like a whisper that no one remembered hearing. not invisible, but indistinct. he had the posture of someone perpetually halfway through a shrug — shoulders slightly raised, hands always buried in coat pockets, as if resisting a world that never asked him to participate in the first place. a laid-back shape of a man, carved from diffidence and observation.

in a city that never stopped upgrading itself, he was deprecated.

not in revolt. not in retreat. just left behind. or maybe he’d never tried to catch up. he didn’t move with the hunger of those chasing status updates or neural injections. he didn’t obsess over the newest mod, didn’t queue outside soul cafés for artificial empathy downloads. if the city was a machine that chewed through ambition, i was the scrap it didn’t bother with.

city of black star wasn’t built — it evolved, like a fungus feeding off human attention. its architecture curved like whispers, its alleys rearranged themselves when you weren’t looking. nothing here was finished; every structure still had scaffolding, like the city was allergic to completion. billboards updated in real-time based on your serotonin levels, and vending machines sold relief in pill-form or pixels. it didn’t just contain loneliness — it manufactured it. there were neighborhoods where no one lived, built just for illusion, for vr projections of fake families to be streamed into. a city doesn’t have to hate you to kill you — it just has to forget you were ever there.

there was a man who sold recycled dreams on memory sticks outside the maglev station. he claimed they were once his, but no one believed him. children were taught coding hymns at temples shaped like servers. dogs barked in binary — modded to serve as both pets and security. every time he passed the soul café, he saw people standing in translucent booths, paying by the minute to feel understood — the empathy ai learned your traumas in under five seconds and offered hugs that felt more real than most lovers. even rain was scheduled, engineered to fall only when it was most marketable. the world no longer unfolded. it was deployed. healing wasn’t a process anymore. it was an app. a mood setting. a toggle between “functional” and “fine.” you could download calm, schedule a cry, outsource your grief.

there was a kind of silence only possible in a city that never shut up. it lived in elevator lobbies at 3 a.m., in train tunnels after last departure.

he wasn’t sad. that would’ve implied emotional investment. he wasn’t even numb. just… vacant, in a soft-edged way. like the world had passed through him so many times that friction no longer occurred.

“breathe, keep breathing don’t lose your nerve pack and get dressed before all hell, breaks loose”

his thoughts were often silent to others, but never to himself. that’s the strange curse of people like me: they’re assumed to be thoughtless, because they speak sparingly and act minimally. but the internal landscape is never quiet. if anything, it’s relentless. thoughts chase themselves like broken code loops — never quite resolving, always restarting. he thought too much, but also not at all. it depended on the hour. on the flicker of a screen. on a passing glance. on a falling leaf. too scared of something good happening because something bad will be the executioner of the joys, but wouldn’t i be the true fool to think my happiness would last? to think that it would only be high and dry.

my past? a spreadsheet of small praises. an ongoing audit of “you could’ve done better” from people who seemed to expect something extraordinary from someone they didn’t bother to understand. every failure — real or imagined — was stored like an encrypted file i didn’t have the password for. they said he wasn’t enough. often. loudly. and then, worst of all, quietly. that subtle erosion. the “i’m just disappointed.” the glance that didn’t linger.

once, maybe, there was a version of me that wanted things. something small — a song i never finished humming, a job i almost cared about. there were fragments, little betrayals of desire that hadn’t yet decayed. i used to linger outside record shops not for the music, but because of the idea that sound could fill a room with feeling. couldn’t remember the last time he smiled without checking if someone was watching. that was the thing about people like him — their ache didn’t shout. it whispered in undone things.

what even is proudness? i know people say it when someone accomplishes something. but what is the feeling of it? i try to imagine saying, “i’m proud of you,” and wonder if it lands like warmth or responsibility. i remember a teacher once patted my shoulder when i fixed a broken circuit — the touch stayed longer than the praise did. maybe proudness is a kind of pause. maybe it’s the world stopping long enough to see you. i’ve only ever heard it said in past tense, like a relic. i don’t know what it feels like to carry that in the present.

but he survived. because that’s what people like him do.

until she said it.

the only person who hadn’t treated him like a background process. the only one who saw — if not brilliance, then at least being. a co-conspirator in stillness. a mirror he didn’t hate looking into. and then one day, she’d said the words that detonated the last shelter he had (bullet proof — i wish i was).

"maybe they’re right. maybe you really don’t do anything. what even have you gotten done."

she hadn’t meant it cruelly. that was the tragedy. it came not from disdain, but fatigue. as if she’d waited too long for him to become someone. as if she’d finally accepted that he wouldn’t.