Branch: Shifting Mirrors (Erin, Chloe, Dawn)

The world returned as if someone had thrown a switch: the light was all wrong, filtered through curtains that looked like they’d been made out of melted wedding dresses, the air sharp with furniture polish and the secret onion stink of someone’s tears. Erin blinked—her eyelids were sticky, and there was a pressure at the back of her head like she’d just come out of anesthesia. She tried to orient herself, but the room was a cheap magic trick, reconfiguring itself every time she moved her eyes. One second, she was standing beside a green corduroy couch. The next, she was on it, the cushion fraying at her thighs, sunlight pulling tiger stripes across her mint-green legs. It felt like she was both observer and observed, trapped inside a snow globe version of the past.

A man sat on the opposite end of the couch. Not Andy. He was younger, a little soft at the jaw, and he wore the kind of cable-knit sweater that was meant to signal safe, upstanding boyfriend. He had hands that looked like they’d never hit anything, and he kept folding and unfolding them in his lap. Next to him sat Marissa, or a version of her: just out of college, hair in a too-tight bun, breasts fighting for space inside a powder-blue oxford shirt. She was a work in progress, not quite the woman Erin knew, but every bit as self-contained. Her face was set in a way that made Erin think of locked bank vaults.

The boyfriend’s voice was syrupy with apology. “I just think—maybe it’s too much right now? With your sister, and grad school, and—well, you know how you get when things are busy.”

Marissa didn’t even blink. “I know how I get,” she said, her voice soft and frighteningly flat.

He ran a hand through his hair. “Look, Riss, you’re amazing. Honestly. I just—sometimes I feel like I’m not even here? Like it’s always about Sarah, or your research, or—” He trailed off, then gave her a long, sad look. “I don’t want to be second all the time. It’s not fair, you know?”

The words hit Erin like a kidney punch. Not just the content, but the way he said it: gentle, practiced, as if he’d already rehearsed the whole scene in front of a mirror and decided how hurt he was allowed to be. She heard her mother in that voice. The long-distance phone calls, the measured pauses, the way she’d always framed her as a burden she carried with a saint’s patience. “I just need you to be a little less, Erin. A little less intense. Give your brother a break, for once. Maybe try being normal.” It was always delivered with a sigh, always followed by a guilt-laced, “You know I love you, right?”

She thought of her father, too, and the times she’d shrunk herself down to fit inside the tight spaces of that man’s approval. She remembered her parents’ divorce, and how her mother weaponized silence while her father simply evaporated from the family like water off a hot pan. Each chose themselves, over and over. The lesson stuck: there was never enough love to go around. If you were second, you might as well be nothing.

She tried to speak, to interrupt the scene, but her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth. Even the air here conspired to keep her out of it.

The boyfriend gave Marissa’s knee a little pat—meant to be reassuring, but it looked like a man checking to see if the table was really steady. “You’re going to do great things, Marissa. I mean that. But I just… can’t be your emotional side project, okay?”

For the first time, Marissa looked up. Her face didn’t move, but her eyes had a shine to them that was worse than any crying. She stared at the man as if he was a fascinating specimen, a rare beetle she’d just pinned to a corkboard for later study. “I understand,” she said.

He nodded, relieved to have it on record. “I wish things were different.”

Marissa stood, hands folded in front of her, and walked him to the door. He mumbled a last apology, then left, his absence pulling a vacuum in the living room. Marissa lingered by the door, one hand resting against the jamb. Erin thought she saw the woman’s fingers tremble, just once, before she pressed them flat to the wood.

The silence got larger. Upstairs, there was the faint, off-rhythm clatter of a wheelchair on hardwood—Sarah, the little sister, moving from one room to another, always at the edge of things. The sound was both ordinary and devastating.

Erin wanted to cross the room, to pull Marissa in and tell her she didn’t have to be so goddamn composed, that sometimes it was okay to let the wound show. But her feet were frozen; her body was anchored in place, as useless as a lawn ornament. She tried to call out Marissa’s name, but what came out was a dry, leafy gasp.

She saw Marissa’s reflection in the hallway mirror. For a second, the glass doubled the woman: one version was perfectly smooth and upright, the other fractured and pale, the lines of her face streaked by light from the street outside. Marissa stared at her own reflection as if daring it to crack.

Erin’s chest filled with pressure—empathy, sure, but also the bitter aftertaste of her own countless, identical rejections. Andy, unable to name what he wanted; Erin, always left holding the bag, always told she was too much, or not enough, or the wrong shape for someone else’s happiness. She felt the shame of every time she’d begged silently for someone to stay, and every time that plea had bounced off their armor and ricocheted back at her.

Something inside her broke. The feeling started as a tremor in her legs, then shot up into her gut. She doubled over, grabbing for the edge of the coffee table, but her hands passed through it as if she were a ghost. She heard herself making a keening noise—low and thin, the kind of sound you’d never let another person hear if you were awake.

Marissa walked back into the living room. She sat down exactly where she’d been before, folded her hands on her lap, and stared at nothing. Her composure was so complete it hurt to look at. Erin saw, with hideous clarity, that this was the moment the shell was formed: the armor that would later make Marissa the best therapist Erin had ever met, and the most unreachable person anyone ever tried to love.

Until The HH.

Erin tried, one last time, to say something. To tell Marissa that it wasn’t her fault, that sometimes the world just sucked, and sometimes even the strongest people needed to be held up. But the words dissolved before they left her mouth, atomized by the centrifugal **** of her own shame.

Her knees buckled, and the carpet rushed up to meet her. She felt herself split into a thousand versions: every Erin who’d ever been left behind, every iteration that had tried to be palatable, every echo of a girl who just wanted someone to stay. The air went hard and cold, and for a moment it seemed the room would collapse under the weight of all that unspoken loss.

Then, as quickly as it began, the world let go. The colors drained out of the room, the furniture unspooled into pixels, the only thing left was the smell of old paper and the taste of tears that never quite made it out. Erin felt herself being lifted, or maybe just erased, until she was nothing but a memory of pain.

The last thing she saw, before the whiteness claimed her, was Marissa’s hands—knuckles white, nails pressed into the pads of her palms. They looked strong enough to hold the whole world together, but Erin knew the truth: they were only ever meant to keep her own heart from falling apart.

She was gone, and the room was empty, and somewhere far away, a sister’s wheelchair rattled on hardwood, the sound of survival echoing down an endless hallway.

The world turned white.

Chloe had expected another childhood tableau, maybe a repeat of the after-school playground or her mother’s kitchen, but instead the world snapped her into a university conference room, cold enough to preserve cadavers. There was a wall of glass at the far end—refusing to look out at the campus, only reflecting the inside back at itself, doubling the rows of vinyl-padded chairs and the scuffed laminate podium. The air hummed with the faint, **** scent of hand sanitizer, and the clock over the door was a full minute behind her phone, which was somehow back in her hand, blinking NO SERVICE.

The place was empty except for Marissa.

Not the Marissa Chloe knew from the show. Younger, this one was all unspooled nerves and desperation, standing at the podium with both hands locked around its edges. She wore a navy pantsuit, too new and too stiff, the kind with sewn-in creases meant to signal competence, but it only made her look as if she were waiting for a firing squad. Her hair was down for once, brushing the collar of her shirt in loose, nervous waves. Even from the back of the room, Chloe could see the way Marissa’s shoulders hunched, the way her neck vanished into her blazer as she tried to hide from the world.

She was laser-focused on the note cards in front of her, her breathing shallow and fluttery, lips mouthing silent syllables as she tried to commit her opening lines to memory.

Chloe took a step forward and felt the room shift around her. The lights overhead buzzed brighter. The floor, which had seemed stable a moment before, now sloped slightly toward the podium, so that every movement brought her closer to the place where the disaster was about to happen.

She knew this terror. The certainty that you would fail spectacularly, that your voice would betray you, that the audience would see right through you and know you for a fraud. Chloe had lived that nightmare in real life and a dozen times in sleep, always waking with her jaw locked and her chest full of acid.

Marissa’s fingers were trembling so hard the cards made a faint, constant chitter. Chloe wanted to tell her to breathe, to count to four, to imagine everyone in the room in their underwear. Instead, she walked quietly down the aisle, footsteps muffled by the gray commercial carpet, until she reached the second row.

The seats in front of her were empty, but she could see the ghost-shapes of students, all hunched over phones, waiting for the show to start. In the reflection on the glass, the room was already full—a standing-room-only crowd, all of them waiting for Marissa to crack.

Chloe edged into the aisle and approached the podium. The nearer she got, the more the anxiety in the room multiplied, as if she were walking through a **** field that pulsed with Marissa’s terror.

Up close, she could see the sweat beading along Marissa’s hairline, the way her jaw clenched and unclenched with every breath. Marissa’s lips moved in a soundless mantra, the words coming out in rapid, atomized bursts: “Don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up.” Her eyes darted to the clock, to the door, then back to the cards, never once looking up at the audience.

Chloe wanted to reach out, but she knew what it was to be startled in a moment of panic. Instead, she stood just to the side, within Marissa’s peripheral vision, and waited.

Marissa didn’t see Chloe at first. She was too busy drowning.

Her hands still gripped the podium with a **** that looked painful, whitening the joints, making her ring dig into the flesh of her finger. Her gaze was welded to the trembling note cards in front of her. Sweat lined her upper lip, and the pulse in her neck was jumping so hard it threatened to snap her skin from the inside. Each time she inhaled, her chest hitched; the air went in, but it didn’t seem to do any good. There was a panic, bright and humming, that rolled off her in waves.

She mumbled her opening paragraph to herself, barely moving her lips, not even mouthing the words but grinding them between her teeth. Chloe could see the beginning of tears, the shine just behind Marissa’s glasses, and the **** effort to hold it back by sheer **** of will.

She knew, instantly, that Marissa would rather be anywhere than here. Maybe dead. Maybe vanished into the walls, or shrunk into one of those chairs and melted away. Chloe recognized the posture, the silent plea for some cosmic accident to strike the room and spare her from having to speak, to be heard, to risk judgment.

Chloe had lived this moment. The first time, it was a poetry contest—she’d been twelve, reading a poem about autumn leaves and mothers who don’t come home from work. Halfway through, her tongue locked and her mouth went dry, and all she could do was stare at the paper and hope to God that someone would tell her it was okay to stop. The second time, it was a university lecture, sophomore year: she mispronounced “hyacinth” and the entire auditorium laughed, not cruelly, but enough to burn the word into her brain as a curse forever.

She’d learned, over time, that the only way out was through. She’d learned it from teachers, from books, from the rarest, gentlest friends who sat in the front row, nodding, silently reminding her that she could do it. It was a lesson paid for in shame and slow recovery, but it never left her.

Now, looking at Marissa, Chloe felt a strange, electric empathy—an urge to shield, to transfer her own accumulated courage by touch, if that was possible.

She stepped into the direct line of Marissa’s vision, careful and slow, so as not to spook her. She didn’t speak right away, just let herself be visible, an anchor point for a drowning soul. She stood with her arms at her sides, back straight, making sure her own breathing was even and slow. She remembered what her therapist had told her about panic attacks: model the breath you want the other person to copy. Make the air go in and out. Let them mirror you.

The room remained empty of noise, except for the clock and the sound of Marissa’s ragged inhales. But as the minute hand moved, Marissa’s eyes started flicking around, **** for escape. They landed, finally, on Chloe’s face.

It was a brief, startled glance—like she hadn’t expected another person to exist here, in this ruin of a moment. Her mouth worked silently, and the cards shook harder, a staccato against the cheap plastic of the podium. Chloe nodded, just once, meeting her gaze with as much warmth as she could muster.

She held Marissa’s eyes, let her see that she wasn’t alone, that whatever happened next would not be a private apocalypse.

Marissa swallowed. The sound was loud enough to echo in the empty hall. For a few seconds, she just stared at Chloe, the confusion and panic duking it out behind her irises. Then, as if waking from a trance, she looked down at the cards, tried to steady her hands.

Her mentor was there in the front row. Maeve. Chloe had heard Marissa talk about her in fragments—how Maeve had been the first to take her seriously, to push her beyond the expected, to make her believe in the power of her own voice. Now, though, Maeve looked worried. She sat perfectly upright, arms folded over a small notebook, her gaze fixed on Marissa like a lighthouse beam. It was supportive, but also a warning: Don’t disappear. I need you here.

Marissa’s voice, when it finally came, was barely audible. “Good afternoon,” she whispered, eyes flicking between Chloe and Maeve and the imaginary rows of students. The words dissolved before they reached the air.

Chloe saw what was happening. She took one more step, closer now, until she was almost at the podium’s edge. She kept her movements slow, deliberate. She thought about how to reach Marissa without embarrassing her, how to bridge that gap between encouragement and rescue.

She let her hand rest on the edge of the podium—just enough so Marissa could see it, could know that someone stood beside her. She leaned in slightly and spoke, her voice low but not a whisper:

“It’s okay. You’re safe. Just breathe with me.”

She didn’t know if Marissa could hear her, or if the words meant anything at all. But she breathed, slow and steady, and waited.

At first, nothing changed. Marissa’s panic was a closed loop: breath caught in the throat, hands gripping harder, gaze flicking from paper to clock to mentor to floor. Chloe let the silence grow, let the moment stretch, and kept her own breath moving in and out with deliberate calm. After a while, Marissa’s own inhale caught the same rhythm, less jagged now, more measured. Her hands stopped shaking so violently.

Chloe saw the color return to Marissa’s face. Not all at once, but gradually: first the cheeks, then the neck, then the pink at the tips of her ears. Her grip loosened, just a fraction. She looked at Chloe again, and this time, there was a kind of **** gratitude—like a drowning swimmer finding a life ring, even if it was made of paper.

Chloe smiled at her, and this was the secret: you didn’t have to say anything else. The smile was enough to say, I know this hurts, but I believe you can do it anyway.

The door at the back of the room opened, and the first of the audience trickled in. A cluster of students, some talking softly, a couple of professors with laptops and the unmistakable smell of burnt coffee. An older woman Chloe somehow recognized as Marissa’s mentor, Maeve, uncrossed her arms and leaned forward in her chair, her whole body radiating silent encouragement.

Marissa looked at the growing crowd, her panic flaring for a moment, but then she looked at Chloe, at the hand on the podium, at the face that hadn’t turned away. She took a long, slow breath. Her voice, when it came again, was shaky but real:

“Good afternoon. My name is Marissa Holt, and today I’ll be discussing… trauma, and recovery, and what it means to survive the things you think you can’t.”

The first sentence fell apart halfway through, but Chloe nodded at her, and Marissa caught herself, tried again.

“My research is about the ways we adapt, the ways we—um—find hope, even after…”

She paused, nearly lost it. Chloe leaned in, not closer, but more present. She met Marissa’s eyes and held them, let her see the unwavering belief there.

Marissa exhaled. “Even after you think it’s over.”

The rest of the talk didn’t go perfectly. Marissa stumbled on a few statistics, lost her place twice, and had to flip her note cards over with trembling hands. But each time she faltered, she found Chloe’s face, the calm, patient breathing, the reminder that she was allowed to continue.

By the third slide, Marissa’s voice had a new edge to it—a kind of rawness, but also a strange power. She stopped hiding behind the cards, started looking at the room, even at Maeve, who now beamed with pride. The audience listened, rapt, and no one laughed when she mispronounced a word, or when her hands shook so much she nearly dropped the clicker.

Chloe felt her own chest loosen with each minute that passed. She’d never been good at saving herself, but she had always been good at believing in others.

When it was over, when Marissa said “Thank you” and the audience applauded in that awkward, earnest way that meant they’d actually paid attention, Chloe stepped back. She didn’t linger for the questions, didn’t wait for the postmortem analysis. She left the room as quietly as she’d entered, the world fading at the edges, the memory dissolving into nothing but the sound of her own, steady breath.

Outside, the hallway was empty and cold. The Garden was waiting for her, the next impossible task already queued up. But for a few minutes, Chloe just walked, letting the echoes of Marissa’s voice carry her forward. She didn’t know what the memory had meant, or if it was even real, but it felt like a victory. Even if it wasn’t hers.

The memory dissolved like breath on glass—the audience fading first, then Marissa's voice, then the podium itself, until Chloe was standing alone in a hallway that no longer existed, her hand still extended toward nothing. She blinked, and the Garden materialized around her: the mirrors were larger now, arranged deliberately, and the pillars had begun to spiral.

The fog was warm against her skin—not cold anymore, but almost welcoming—and as she moved forward, the floor chimed beneath her feet like bells struck underwater. The mirrors tilted toward her as she passed, as if acknowledging her presence, and she noticed their reflections lagged by half a second, creating a strange echo of movement that wasn't quite hers. The darkness had lifted slightly, layered now rather than suffocating, and soft luminescence emanated from the glass pillars as they rearranged themselves into a tighter spiral around her.

Blue light refracted occasionally through the fog—someone's lantern, somewhere beyond—and she could hear whispers threading through the hum: "Thank you for today," someone said, and then “I’m always left behind," and beneath it all, a younger voice: "I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry." The larger mirror fragments showed faint movement—shadows shifting within them—and Chloe realized the Garden was watching her, that her steadiness had changed something here. One of the larger shards flashed, beckoning, and she moved toward it, her breathing still even, still calm, still the anchor she'd learned to be.

Dawn had once spent a winter as a college janitor. She knew the smell of institutional cleanser, the way it lodged in your sinuses and left every breath tinged with a chemical numbness. So when she came to in the library bathroom—university, definitely, she could tell by the ADA railings and the extra-wide stall—her first reaction was to pinch her nose and blink hard, as if the sting might be scrubbed out by will alone.

But of course, this wasn't real. Or if it was, it was only real in the sense that pain is always real, and shame never dies. The tile was white, not by accident but by design, so no one could miss even the smallest blot or smudge. Every surface was a display case for dirt, for failure. The fluorescent overheads washed everything to a single plane of brightness, no shadows or shelter.

Norah was there, hunched on the closed lid of the toilet. Not the woman from The HH, but a raw, unfinished version: hair in a tangled bun, eyes ringed with mascara that had been eroded and then re-applied and then eroded again. The exhaustion wasn't just in her face; it was in the way her elbows sank into her thighs, the way she balanced a ream of printouts and manila envelopes on her lap, as if to lose even one would mean complete ruin.

She’d been crying—ten minutes, maybe longer. Dawn could see the way Norah’s hands trembled, the way each intake of breath shuddered through her chest and then got pinched off by pride before it became a sob. There was a strip of toilet paper folded neatly on her thigh, ready for the next failure. There was always a next one.

At first, Dawn didn’t move. She hovered in the vestibule of the memory, unsure if she was supposed to be here, unsure if stepping forward would contaminate the moment or somehow give Norah’s pain a witness it didn’t want. She waited, and the seconds kept passing, bright and clinical, loud with the drone of the ceiling vent.

Norah picked up a sheet from the top of the stack. A bursar’s bill, with an amount due circled in red. Next, a printout of an email: the subject line read “FINAL WARNING.” Next, a financial aid form, each blank unfilled and damning. Underneath, a boarding pass—Chicago to New York, winter break, a date circled in the same pen. The cost of the flight was written in the margin, then scribbled out, then rewritten smaller.

She stared at the papers, her jaw set. Every so often, her lips would move as if she was rehearsing an answer for an invisible interrogation. “It’s under control.” “I’m handling it.” “There’s nothing to worry about.” Each lie got whispered and then swallowed. The effort of it was visible, like a muscle cramp in her neck.

A flush sounded from the next stall, and Dawn’s heart stuttered. Someone else was here—maybe this was the moment the world came crashing in. She steeled herself, not for a confrontation but for the mundane horror of being seen in the act of falling apart.

The stall door opened and out stepped a young woman. Blonde, tall, dressed in a sweater that looked so soft it might have been grown in a lab. Her eyes were kind, but in the predatory way of someone who’s been trained from birth to be helpful. She caught sight of Norah, and her face performed a little waltz: surprise, concern, something like practiced empathy.

“Hey,” she said, her voice clear and ringing, the sort that always gets picked for orientation leader. “Norah, right? Is everything okay?”

Norah managed to pull herself up a few vertebrae. “Yeah. It’s just—finals. You know how it is.” The words had a ****, slippery sound, as if she were trying to pass them without chewing.

The blonde hesitated. She clearly knew Norah, or at least recognized her as someone from a shared class or group project. She glanced at the stack of papers in Norah’s lap, then at Norah’s face, and for a split second, Dawn could see the algebra happening: the calculation of whether to ask, whether to care, whether to retreat.

“You want to talk about it?” the woman said, pulling a stick of lip balm from her pocket and rolling it over her lower lip. “Sometimes it helps to, like, vent. Or at least complain.”

Norah’s smile was so brittle it barely flexed. “I’m good. Really.”

The woman nodded, then reached into her purse and came out with a granola bar. She extended it, arm at full length, as if the space between them was radioactive. “In case you need it. You look like you could use some sugar.”

Norah hesitated, but took the bar. “Thanks.”

The woman lingered. “If you need help with the forms, you know the financial aid office is still open. My Dad’s on the alumni board, and he says they can sometimes push stuff through last minute.”

For a moment, Norah just stared at her. The words landed like little beads of rain, each one meant to help but pooling up, cold and useless. She nodded—once, a single downward beat. “I’ll look into it.”

The woman, sensing she’d done her part, glanced in the mirror and swept a hand through her hair, checking her teeth. She turned back to Norah, face reset to neutral. “Okay, well, good luck on your exams.”

“Thanks,” Norah managed.

The woman left. The door swung closed, but the echo of her presence stayed behind, an afterimage that made the air feel even emptier.

Norah held the granola bar. Her thumb ran over the wrapper, back and forth, as if she could erase the branding or the memory of the transaction. Then, with methodical precision, she unwrapped one end, broke off a piece, and chewed it, not tasting, just moving the energy forward.

Dawn felt the ache of the scene in her own ribs. It wasn’t the granola bar or the bills—it was the way Norah held herself, the way she refused to fall apart even when the world’s gravity was set against her. Dawn wanted to reach out, to say something, but her own tongue had gone flat and heavy.

She remembered her own freshman year, the time her father lost his job at the tire factory and their heating bill went unpaid for two months. Dawn had studied for exams by huddling next to the laundry room dryer at 2 AM, hoping the noise would drown out her hunger. She’d never told anyone, not even her closest friends, that she’d stolen cafeteria food for an entire semester. She’d spent years balancing the family’s meager finances, sacrificing herself when needed to make sure her brothers always had something to eat. She’d spent half her life learning that poverty wasn’t just a lack of money—it was the constant, humming fear that you could never let anyone see how badly you wanted, or needed, or hoped.

She watched Norah eat the granola bar, then refold the toilet paper and dab under her eyes, then carefully reconstruct the stack of documents on her lap. Each gesture was deliberate, like an athlete rehearsing a routine to distract from the agony underneath.

After a few minutes, Norah stood. She walked to the mirror, set the papers on the counter, and stared at herself. She wiped her cheeks, pinched her nose, squared her shoulders. She tried a few practice smiles, each one stiffer than the last. Finally, she found one that was just plausible enough to survive scrutiny.

Dawn hovered, unable to enter the frame, unable to leave it. She was stuck between impulse and paralysis. If she stepped forward, would Norah even see her? Or would the memory flicker, reset, and discard her as a contaminant?

The bathroom door swung open again, and this time it was a group of women—undergrads, all business-casual, chattering about final projects and campus gossip. They took no notice of Norah, which meant they noticed everything and had collectively agreed to ignore it. One of them checked the stalls, found them empty, and announced, “Let’s just use this one, we have to be quick.”

Norah gathered her papers and slipped past them, moving so efficiently that it was clear she’d practiced this escape before. She didn’t look at anyone. She made herself small, invisible. The group continued their chatter as if she hadn’t existed.

Dawn followed Norah into the hallway. The world outside was just as unforgiving: bulletin boards layered with torn fliers, a vending machine with the glass cracked in one corner, windows so grimy the light looked gray even at noon. Norah moved like a shadow, ducking into an alcove beside the elevators, clutching her papers to her chest.

There, finally, she let herself sink to the floor. The tile was cold and hard, and for a moment, Norah sat with her head down, her breath fogging the surface of her bills and printouts. She was silent, but every inch of her radiated exhaustion, the kind that comes not from exertion but from carrying too much disappointment for too long.

Dawn approached, step by step, until she was beside Norah on the ground. She didn’t try to touch her. Instead, she matched Norah’s posture: knees drawn up, back against the wall, hands loose in her lap.

The two of them sat in silence, the only sound the distant whir of an elevator and the soft, arrhythmic tapping of Norah’s fingers on the manila envelope.

Dawn wanted to say, “I know what it’s like.” She wanted to say, “It’s not your fault.” She wanted to say, “You are allowed to cry, when you’re breaking.” But the words were too big, too dangerous. She settled for sitting, for breathing, for letting her own presence be a form of silent recognition.

She closed her eyes, and let the fluorescent light paint her eyelids white, and for the first time in a long time, she didn’t feel completely alone.

The world went white.