[POV Orión]

  Silence had become my only roommate, the stale air of my apartment, my only atmosphere. Not the silence of peace, but the dense, heavy silence of a tomb, sealed from the inside.

  After the confession to Sora and her rejection, the world, which was already a farce to me, had completely crumbled, taking with it the st pilrs of my precarious existence.

  My days turned into an endless cycle of staring at the ceiling, or the computer screen with the same movie paused for hours, or simply the wall.

  My phone screen, once a noisy portal to social life, now flickered with unread calls and messages.

  At first, they were frequent, filled with that false concern that activates when someone "popur" gets depressed and breaks the mold.

  I remember a text message from Jake, in the early days: "Come on, Orion, cheer up. There are plenty of other girls in the world. Sora wasn't the only one. Let's go out, my treat this time."

  His tone was that of someone flipping a coin, not really expecting it to nd on their side.

  I ignored the message. It wasn't about Sora. It wasn't about the lost romance. It was about the emptiness that had become a bck hole in my chest.

  She had only confirmed what I already knew about myself: that I had no value without a purpose. And that purpose, that st spark of hope, had vanished with the sight of Sora walking away in the sunset.

  Leo, always the more perceptive one, tried a different approach.

  He intercepted me one afternoon in the hallway, when I was heading to the bathroom, the only exploratory journey I made during the day, if going to the bathroom could even be considered such a thing.

  "We know you've been down, Orion. Really. But you can't shut yourself in like this. If you need to talk..."

  His voice was cautious, filled with the palpable discomfort of someone who doesn't know how to handle someone "broken." It wasn't an offer of comfort; it was a demand for normalcy.

  "I'm fine," I cut him off, my voice rough and hoarse from ck of use. I was surprised at how unfamiliar it sounded.

  I didn't want to talk. I didn't want to show my misery. I wanted them to disappear, for the whole world to vanish and leave me alone in my own rot, without the need to pretend.

  That interaction was the st time Leo looked me directly in the eyes.

  After that, his gnces were fleeting, quick, as if he feared catching my sadness, as if it were a contagious disease that could jump from my dying soul to his.

  The days turned into a gray paste. The calls from my "friends" ceased. The invitations to go out vanished. The notifications from the chat groups, once a constant swirl, went silent, leaving me out.

  I began to feel how the space I occupied in their lives reduced, shrank, until it disappeared completely. It wasn't an abrupt cut, but a slow, agonizing fade.

  My roommates, Jake and Leo, became shadows. Their beds were still in the adjacent rooms, their things in the kitchen, but their presence, their friendship, was gone.

  They were like ghosts inhabiting the same walls, making noise, breathing, but not seeing me.

  Not acknowledging me.

  I remember a Tuesday dinner. The kitchen table, once bustling with ughter and campus talk, was strangely quiet.

  I was in my room, the door ajar, listening to the ctter of silverware against porcein and the murmur of their voices. They didn't invite me to join them. They didn't mention me.

  I only heard "pass the bread" or "how was your css today." It was as if I had never existed, as if the space I had occupied at the table had closed without anyone noticing.

  The pain was no longer the sharp pang of Sora's rejection. It was a dull, persistent ache that spread throughout my being.

  A suffocating sensation that compressed my chest. There was nothing. I had no one.

  My dead parents, my inheritance a mockery of my uselessness, my friends... my friends had evaporated like steam from a kettle.

  Their friendship, as I always suspected, had been as shallow as beer foam. It had sted as long as I was the guy who paid for things, or the one who was there to fill a space, to make up the numbers.

  Now that I was broken, they discarded me. Like a broken toy. Like a problem they didn't want to fix.

  Loneliness was a relentless predator, and I its prey.

  I curled up tighter in my bed, feeling the cold of insignificance chilling me to the bone. University, csses, projects... everything became a cruel joke. I stopped going.

  Notifications of absences piled up in my email, ignored. What for? Why pretend I cared about a future that no longer existed for me?

  The routine of my isotion became macabre. I got up only to go to the bathroom or to grab something to eat from the fridge, which now contained only forgotten, moldy remnants.

  Sometimes, I went down to the kitchen just to see how Jake and Leo had left their clean dishes and my pile of dirty ones kept growing.

  One night, Jake left a note on my mountain of dishes: "Can you wash these? They smell bad." There was no "please." There was no concern for my well-being.

  Just a compint. A final vestige of interaction, and it was a reprimand.

  Time blurred. The days melted into a gray, shapeless amalgam. I didn't know if it was Tuesday or Saturday. The sun shone or it rained; it didn't matter.

  I lived in a self-imposed twilight, with the curtains always drawn, the artificial light of the phone or the computer as my only contact with anything resembling luminescence.

  My thoughts were a constant loop, a rusty mill that only produced the same question:

  How did I get here? Guilt, regret, self-loathing... were constant companions.

  I remembered Sora's smile, the way her hand rested on my arm in the mall, and then her words: "I don't think you're someone to build something with. You have no ambition, Orion. Just money."

  They were the words of an oracle, pronouncing my destiny.

  I hadn't cried. The tears wouldn't come.

  There was a dryness in my soul that didn't allow even that relief. Just a profound numbness, an emptiness that seemed to absorb all emotion.

  The apartment became my personal tomb. The sofa, my bed. The window, my only connection to a world that had decided I was no longer a part of it. I watched people walk by on the street, with their lives, their purposes, their connections. I envied them with a coldness that frightened me. In the past, I felt sorry for myself. Now, I only felt... nothing. Or, worse, a kind of icy indifference.

  One day, I found myself staring at my reflection in the computer's turned-off screen. My eyes were sunken, my skin pale, my bck hair matted. I wasn't attractive. I was a ghost.

  A residue of what had once been a college student with an inheritance.

  The question, which had been a whisper, was now a silent scream in my head. It twisted in my gut, choking me in my own despair.

  How was I supposed to live?

  That was the question. With no one. With nothing I cared about. With no reason to get up, to eat, to breathe. I didn't have a future. I didn't have a present.

  The past was a painful echo of those who had left, those who had rejected me, those who had abandoned me. My parents. Sora. Jake. Leo. Nothing.

  I felt like a boat adrift on an infinite ocean, without sails, without a rudder, without a port in sight.

  Only the freezing water, the cold that chilled me to the bones of my soul, and the certainty that the abyss was waiting for me, ready to swallow me whole.

  I closed my eyes, wishing the void would consume me once and for all.

  How do you live when there is absolutely nothing left to fight for, to hope for, to be?