Description

It did not begin with a scream, or a breakdown, or any cinematic collapse. It began with silence. A pause in the rhythm of thought, like a skipped heartbeat in the middle of an ordinary day. Something cracked quietly beneath the surface—so subtly that I mistook it for nothing at all. The first fracture is never loud. It's a whisper. A shift. A breath you forget to take.

I remember the moment not by what happened, but by what stopped happening. Laughter felt foreign. Focus turned slippery. I began to question not just what I was doing, but why I existed inside this particular mind. It was as though I were watching my own life from behind fogged glass, present but unreal. People around me laughed, planned, moved forward. I remained still, while everything else seemed to blur.

You don't notice the mind turning against you at first. It disguises itself as tiredness. As detachment. As overthinking. It wraps itself in routines, until you wake one morning and realize you've forgotten how to feel anything that matters. That is the cruelty of the fracture—it is slow, patient, and deliberate. And by the time you hear the break, it is already deep.