The office smelled like burnt coffee and stale air. Always the same smell. I had walked past it for years, but tonight, it pressed against my skin like a damp cloth. I could taste it in my throat. Every sip of instant coffee had been an apology to myself: "Keep going. Just one more hour."
But I couldn't.
I looked at her picture on the edge of my desk. Not the smiling one we posed for—she didn't smile like that with me anymore. That one was fake, a lie frozen in time. The one I kept hidden. The one that reminded me, painfully, that she had chosen someone else. Someone better. Lighter. Someone who didn't carry the weight of exhaustion in his bones, someone who didn't know failure intimately.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to punch the desk, punch her, punch everything. But my body didn't obey me. It was like every muscle had turned to stone.
I thought about all the overtime, all the empty deadlines, all the nights spent staring at spreadsheets until the numbers blurred together. I thought about the promotions that came with smiles that didn't reach eyes. I thought about the tiny apartment I couldn't afford, about the loneliness that wrapped itself around me like a second skin.
And then… I felt it.
A hollowing. My chest sagged. My heartbeat slowed until it felt like a distant drum, fading, fading. My thoughts became slippery. Faces, names, regrets, memories—they tumbled over each other, none of them solid, none of them real.
I pressed my face into the cold desk. And I let myself feel all of it. All of it—the failure, the betrayal, the exhaustion. And for a brief, terrible moment, I understood what it meant to… give up.
Darkness didn't come like a storm. It came like water, filling my lungs slowly, quietly, swallowing me from the inside. And somewhere in that emptiness, I felt it: a whisper. Barely there.
Another life. Another chance.
I didn't understand it. I didn't even know if I wanted it. But it pulled at me. And for the first time in years… I stopped resisting./