I have answered “Good, just tired” twenty times since Monday, but tonight the kitchen floor has claimed the rest of me.
**I have answered “Good, just tired” twenty times since Monday, but tonight the kitchen floor has claimed the rest of me.**
The yellow linoleum under my knees is cold, colder than the room itself. A thin ridge where the adhesive failed years ago presses into the bone of my left shin, leaving a dent I can feel through my denim. In front of me, the bottom cabinet door hangs open two inches, revealing a dark nest of plastic grocery bags. I came in here for a drinking glass, but I never reached the cupboard.
The refrigerator motor gives its shuddering groan and cuts out, dropping the apartment into a sudden, ringing stillness. Through the floorboards, I can hear the muffled murmur of the downstairs neighbor’s television, a laugh track dulled by plaster and dust. On the counter above my head, a mug of tap water has gone completely room temperature. A film of grey dust has already begun to gather across its surface under the bare ceiling bulb.
People talk about breaking down as if it always involves weeping into your hands, but this feels entirely flat. It feels as though someone unthreaded the cord that keeps my spine upright and quietly slipped it out of the room. My coat is still zipped to my throat, heavy wool that smells faintly of subway brake dust and rain. I have not even unlaced my boots.
At three this afternoon, someone dropped a stack of manila folders onto my desk with a brisk comment about the weather. I adjusted my glasses, smiled with my teeth showing, and made an agreeable noise about rain before the weekend. My hands were moving across the keyboard, typing three-digit account numbers with clean, practiced efficiency, while the back of my mind felt like a wet slate wiped down with a greasy rag. Nobody notices when you are disappearing, as long as you hit your keystrokes on time.
---
The radiator by the window begins to hiss, spitting three sharp metallic clicks into the corner of the kitchen before settling into a low wheeze. That sound has marked every winter I’ve lived in this building, predictable and dry, smelling of baked dust and old iron. Usually it makes the apartment feel small and sheltered, like a sleeping compartment on a train. Tonight it just sounds like machinery running out of water.
My phone rests face-up on the floor three inches from my knuckles, its screen dark against the fake-oak pattern of the tile. There is a notification from my brother, sent half an hour ago, asking if I remembered to order our mother’s birthday flowers. Below that, a message from Sarah asking if I want to get dinner near the park on Thursday night. Both messages require an answer, and both answers require pretending I am someone who currently exists in the future.
I know the exact script I am supposed to send Sarah. It requires an exclamation mark, two sentences about being swamped with deadlines, and a vague promise to reconnect next week. That is the currency of keeping people at arm’s length without letting them know you are falling behind. You smile in the margins, and you never let the silence linger long enough for anyone to ask a second question.
I lean my forehead against the wooden frame of the cabinet and breathe in the smell of wood polish and old cardboard. The quiet inside the room is absolute, heavy and dense like wet sand filling a bucket. Without meaning to, without any theatrical weight, I say the truth into the dark gap between the cabinet doors.
“I’m not okay.”
The words do not bounce off the walls; they drop straight down into the dust between my knees. It is the first completely true sentence I have spoken out loud since autumn. Hearing it does not fix the radiator, and it does not untangle the week ahead, but it stops the frantic spinning in my ribs. It is a simple diagnosis of an obvious fact, like pointing to a cracked windowpane and admitting the winter wind is coming through.
I reach out one finger and press the button on the side of the phone. The screen flares to life, harsh in the dim kitchen, cutting across my knuckles and the faded hem of my trousers. I open Sarah’s thread, thumb hovering over the blinking cursor in the message field. My fingers feel thick, stiff from the cold draft running along the baseboard, but the habitual urge to perform has vanished.
I backspace through the draft that said I would let her know about Thursday. I delete the cheerful punctuation and the hollow apology for my busy calendar until the field is empty again.
Instead, I type seven words.
“I’m really struggling tonight. Can you call?”
I press send before my thumb has time to reconsider, then lay the glass
This story is part of the K-Will Stories archive — an anonymised, content-warned, candle-react grief-and-resilience collection. Reading: 3 min · Theme: confession-not-okay · Mood: heavy.
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