The Quiet Collapse
Elliot Graves hadn't looked in a mirror for seven months. He had memorized the cracks in the bathroom wall instead—the way the plaster resembled rivers on an old map. Mornings, if he could call them that, arrived not with light but with the distant roar of buses and the subtle creaks of the old floorboards that held up his apartment like frail bones.
He woke up hungry, not for food but for silence. Silence didn't ask questions. Silence didn't pretend to care. Silence let him float in its numb waters where he didn't have to be anything at all.
His job at the city archive was the only part of his life still stitched to time. He handled forgotten things—letters never sent, blueprints of buildings long demolished, photographs of strangers who smiled into a future that never included him. He preferred the past. It didn't require interaction. It stayed in its place. The irony wasn't lost on him, being a man who catalogued memory while refusing to face his own.
Co-workers gave up on small talk long ago. Elliot was polite, always polite, and utterly unknowable. He replied with nods, sometimes a half-smile, but his eyes were glass. No one knew what he did on weekends. No one asked. Some assumed he was shy. Others suspected something deeper, darker, but they all looked away eventually. Looking too long at sadness can make you feel complicit.
One Monday, a new intern asked him why the lights in his office were always off.
"It's easier to see the past in the dark," he said.
She laughed, unsure if it was a joke.
It wasn't.