My room was a mess.

But it was my kind of mess.

Sticky notes were plastered across my mirror like butterflies mid-flight. Each one had a half-thought: an idea for a comic, a lyric I hadn’t written music for, quotes from strangers I overheard on the bus. Some of them didn’t even make sense anymore — “Paint the sadness like sky,” read one. Another just said, “Crows can’t swim. Why is that important?”

Sketchbooks lay open across the floor, their spines bent, pages half-sketched, layered in frantic lines and wild colors. There were faces I didn’t recognize, creatures that didn’t exist, and entire scenes of worlds that had only lived in my head — until now.

Paint stains covered my hands. Blue on my right wrist, red on my fingers, a smear of yellow across the back of my left hand. My fingernails were rimmed with color like I’d dipped them in some technicolor galaxy and forgotten to come back.

And glitter. God, so much glitter.

It was on the floor, the bed, in my hair, stuck to my face. I think I even ate some by accident. That wouldn’t surprise me.

I hadn’t slept in three nights, but I didn’t feel tired. Who needs sleep when your brain is on fire? When your thoughts are running faster than your body can keep up, and every second you spend doing nothing feels like suffocating?

I was creating.

I was alive.

I was electric.

“Rhea, seriously, what’s going on in here?”

Mom’s voice cracked through the door like thunder. Sharp. Impatient.

I spun around, grinning — hair half-curled, half-knotted, a pencil stuck behind one ear, and glitter clinging to my cheekbones like war paint. I looked like chaos.

But it was beautiful chaos.

“Nothing,” I chirped, tossing a brush onto the nearest sketchbook. “Just... living my genius era.”

The door creaked open just enough for her to peer inside. Her eyes scanned the room like a detective at a crime scene.

Paint on the floor. Open jars. Wet canvases stacked against the wall. The mattress half-off the bedframe. A plate of cookies that were definitely no longer edible.

And me. Standing in the middle of it all, glowing like I’d swallowed the sun.

She blinked. “You’ve been up all night again?”

“Three nights,” I corrected proudly.

“Rhea…”

That sigh. The one that sounded like she was tired of trying. Like she’d given up trying to understand me a long time ago.

I wasn’t tired.

I wasn’t sad.

I was everything.

All at once.

Fast. Bright. Loud.

Unstoppable.

At least, I thought I was.

Fast-forward four days.

The sketchbooks were still on the floor.

Same pages. Same faces.

But I couldn’t lift my head to open them.

The paint on my fingers had dried and cracked, like old dirt I couldn’t scrub away.

My arms felt heavy. My legs, heavier.

Every movement felt like I was underwater — thick, slow, distant.

The glitter that once shimmered on the ceiling now looked... mocking. Like a reminder of something I no longer was.

My room was still a mess.

But now, it didn’t feel like mine.

It felt like someone else’s memories, left behind in a rush.

The ideas that once burned in my mind had fizzled out.

Gone.

Like they never existed.

I lay curled up on the mattress, facing the wall. Blankets pulled over my head even though it was too hot. The buzzing in my head wouldn’t stop — not noise exactly, just... heaviness. A dull, aching silence that wrapped around everything like fog.

“You okay, Rhea?” my best friend texted.

The screen lit up, glowing white in the darkness of my blanket cave.

I stared at it.

Didn’t move.

Didn’t blink.

I could have replied.

I should have replied.

But I didn’t.

Because the truth was — I wasn’t okay.

Not even close.

I wasn’t tired anymore.

I was exhausted.

The kind of exhaustion that didn’t come from staying up too long.

It came from feeling too much. From being too much.

I was broken.

Empty.

Heavy.

My mom knocked once on the door. I didn’t answer. I don’t think she came in.

Outside, the world kept moving. Birds chirped. A scooter honked. Kids screamed on their way to school.

Inside me, everything was frozen.

And I couldn’t explain it. Not really.

How do you explain going from “I’m a genius” to “I’m a ghost” in less than a week?

How do you tell someone that the mind that made magic a few days ago is now your worst enemy?

I tried to write something in the notes app.

Maybe just a sentence. A poem.

But the words refused to come.

It felt like I had forgotten how to be myself.

I wasn’t a genius.

I was a joke.

The kind of joke no one laughs at — because it’s not funny.

It’s just sad.

If this was a movie, this is the part where the music would fade.

Where the camera would pull back slowly from my window, and the screen would dim to black.

And the audience would sit there, silent.

Because something broke — and no one knows how to fix it yet.

But this isn’t a movie.

It’s just me.

In this room.

In this mess.

In this silence.

Waiting.

I turned around slowly, blinking as my mother stood at the doorway with her arms crossed and a look that screamed “enough.”

She scanned the room like she was mentally listing every reason I needed help.

“Rhea, seriously, what’s going on in here?”

I shrugged, rubbing a streak of dried paint on my arm.

“It’s art,” I said simply. “Art is messy.”

Mom stepped carefully over an open sketchbook.

“You haven’t slept, you haven’t eaten, and your phone has been switched off for two days. I was about to call the police!”

That part might’ve been a slight exaggeration, but knowing her, not by much.

“I was in the zone,” I muttered, flopping back onto my beanbag chair. “Didn’t feel like talking.”

“Didn’t feel like talking?” she repeated, her voice rising. “Rhea, this isn’t normal. You can’t keep doing this every time you get inspired. You need balance.”

I hated that word. Balance.

To me, that sounded like putting limits on the one thing that made me feel alive.

“Just give me a few more hours, okay?” I said. “I’m almost done.”

She didn’t answer right away.

Instead, she sat down at the edge of my bed, which was covered in fabric scraps, glue sticks, and pieces of broken jewelry I’d planned to use in a mixed-media piece.

She looked tired.

Older than usual.

“Your teacher called again.”

That made me sit up straighter.

“What did she say?”

“She said you missed your presentation last Friday. And your final portfolio deadline was yesterday.”

My heart dropped.

I had completely forgotten.

I had been so wrapped up in this new series—these abstract portraits exploding with color and emotion—that time had lost its meaning.

Literally.

“You said you wanted to get into that art residency,” Mom said softly. “But how are you supposed to do that if you don’t even show up?”

I rubbed my forehead. “I know. I know, I messed up. I just—I get stuck in my head. And when I’m creating, it’s like... everything else just disappears.”

She nodded, more out of tiredness than agreement.

There was a long pause.

Then, almost carefully, she added:

“Maybe it’s time we talked to someone.”

That pulled me out of my haze.

“What? Like a therapist?”

“Yes.”

I scoffed. “I’m not crazy, Mom.”

“I didn’t say you were,” she replied, standing up. “But shutting out the world for days at a time, forgetting to eat or sleep—it’s not healthy.”

“I’m just passionate.”

“You’re hurting yourself, Rhea.”

That part stung.

Because somewhere deep down, I knew she wasn’t wrong.

But I also didn’t want to admit it.

Not yet.

After she left the room, I sat in the middle of my mess, staring at my half-finished canvas.

The face on it looked like mine—but twisted. The eyes were too wide, the mouth unfinished.

It looked frantic.

Just like I felt.

Later that evening, I found myself on the rooftop.

It was my safe spot.

No one ever came up there, except the occasional pigeon or a stray cat.

From there, I could see the city lights blur like glitter in motion.

My sketchbook was open on my lap.

A pencil in my hand.

I wasn’t drawing anything specific—just lines, shadows, broken faces.

Then I heard footsteps.

I turned.

It was Neha, our upstairs neighbor.

She was wearing oversized headphones around her neck and holding a half-empty mug.

“Oh,” she said. “Didn’t know anyone else came up here.”

“Same,” I replied, scooting over to give her space.

She sat beside me.

Her presence was calm.

Easy.

After a while, she glanced at my sketchbook.

“That’s intense,” she said.

I snorted. “You’re not the first to say that.”

“But I like it,” she added. “It’s raw. Like it’s telling the truth, even if it’s kind of scary.”

That made me pause.

Not many people got it.

I looked at her sideways.

“Are you an artist too?”

She shrugged. “Sort of. I write songs. Mostly sad ones.”

I smiled. “I paint sad things. We’re a perfect match.”

She laughed.

It was soft and real.

The next day, I agreed to go with Mom to see the counselor.

Just once.

Just to prove I wasn’t “crazy.”

But the room was warm and smelled like lavender. The therapist—Ms. Anika—had kind eyes and listened like she wasn’t judging me.

“So you use art as a way to express what’s going on inside?” she asked.

“Yeah. Pretty much. It’s like... if I don’t paint, I explode.”

“And do you know what’s causing all that pressure?”

I didn’t answer.

Because honestly? I wasn’t sure.

Was it school?

The fear of failure?

The pressure to be brilliant?

Or maybe... the way I sometimes looked at girls the way my friends looked at boys, and I wasn’t sure what that meant for me.

Maybe that too.

I didn’t say that part.

Not yet.

But it was there.

A quiet truth, waiting for its own page in my sketchbook.

That night, I stayed off social media and didn’t pick up a paintbrush.

Instead, I laid on my bed, staring at the ceiling.

Mom peeked into my room.

“You okay?”

I nodded.

“Didn’t expect you to actually talk to her,” she said. “I’m proud of you.”

I gave her a small smile.

Not because everything was fine.

But because for the first time in weeks, I didn’t feel completely alone in my head.

Maybe this was what healing looked like.

Messy. Uncomfortable.

Like my room.

But also kind of... honest.

The studio apartment pulsed with color and chaos. Sunlight poured in through the cracked window, catching on the glitter still floating in the air like fairy dust that refused to settle. My playlist buzzed softly in the background — a mix of indie rock, spoken word poetry, and ambient sounds of city streets. The noise comforted me. It matched the noise in my head.

I stood in front of my canvas, half-finished, hands trembling slightly from too much coffee and not enough sleep. The reds were bleeding too much into the blacks. It wasn’t working. Nothing I did lately seemed to work.

Knock knock knock.

Three soft knocks on the door. Then silence. I didn’t answer.

“Rhea. I brought you breakfast,” Mom’s voice filtered through.

I closed my eyes.

“Just leave it outside,” I called back, trying to sound calm, normal, not like someone who was unraveling one brushstroke at a time.

She didn’t reply, but I heard the gentle rustle of a bag being placed on the floor and her footsteps walking away.

I didn’t open the door. I stared at the canvas again. My fingers twitched, aching to fix it, to fix everything. But my mind wandered instead — to her.

Ira.

She’d been a blur in my mind these past few days, like a memory trying too hard to be forgotten. The truth was, I didn’t even know her. Not really. Just a stranger I met in the waiting room, the one who didn’t flinch when I confessed that sometimes I felt like I was burning from the inside out.

The day I bumped into her… she’d looked thinner. Sadder. Her smile had been polite but tired. I hadn’t stopped to look longer.

I shook the thought away. No more distractions. I had a deadline coming up. The gallery needed three complete pieces by next week, and so far, I had half of one and a mountain of crumpled drafts.

I picked up the brush again. The red was still too angry. Or maybe I was. I thought of Dad’s voice echoing in my head: “You have to be practical, Rhea. Art won’t pay your rent forever.”

He hadn’t come around much since my diagnosis. Bipolar. Like it was some scary word to tiptoe around. Like I’d suddenly become fragile glass.

But I wasn’t glass. I was a storm.

By late afternoon, I finally emerged from my cave. My hands were stained and stiff. The breakfast mom left had gone cold. I ate it anyway, sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring out the window.

Down on the street, people moved like pieces of a broken music box — some dancing, some trudging, all unaware of the chaos inside my apartment… or my mind.

I checked my phone. Two new messages from Ava.

Ava: “We’re still on for group tomorrow? Dr. Chandra said you should show up more.” Ava (again): “Also, I found something you might like — poetry slam next Friday. Open mic. Wanna go?”

I didn’t reply right away. Ava had been the one person from the hospital who stuck around after discharge. She was sunshine with anxiety issues, the kind of person who laughed even when she was crying. I admired her for that.

I texted back finally:

Me: “Yeah. Group, fine. Open mic… maybe.”

My fingers hovered over the keyboard. I almost typed, “Have you seen Ira?” but deleted it before hitting send.

The next day, group therapy was more crowded than usual. A few new faces. One girl looked barely older than sixteen, hair dyed blue and tears barely hidden beneath eyeliner. Another guy had a service dog and didn’t say a word the whole session.

I sat quietly at the corner of the circle. Ava sat next to me, nudging me now and then with whispered commentary that made me smile despite myself.

Then Ira walked in.

I didn’t expect it. My body stiffened the moment I saw her. She looked… different. Her long black hair was tied up messily, dark circles under her eyes. But she was still beautiful in that soft, broken way. Like a stained-glass window with pieces missing but still catching the light.

She didn’t see me at first. She took a seat directly across the circle, not even glancing up. I tried to focus on the group leader’s voice, something about “coping mechanisms” and “honoring your feelings,” but my brain was buzzing.

Was it rude to ignore her? Did she even remember me?

Suddenly, she looked up. Our eyes met.

My heart thudded.

She didn’t smile. But she didn’t look away either.

Something passed between us — not recognition, but maybe… understanding?

When the group ended, people slowly started leaving. I lingered behind, stuffing my sketchpad into my tote bag. Ira was standing near the coffee station, holding a paper cup with trembling fingers.

I didn’t plan on walking up to her. But my feet moved on their own.

“Hey.”

She looked up. Her expression didn’t change much, but I noticed her eyes soften slightly.

“Rhea, right?”

I nodded.

“You remembered,” I said, more surprised than I should have been.

“Of course,” she said simply. “You talk like a poet. Hard to forget.”

My breath caught. I wasn’t sure what to say next.

“Are you… okay?” I asked.

She gave a tired smile. “Getting divorced,” she said, like she was saying she’d lost a shoe. “He cheated. My mom found out. Now everything’s chaos.”

I stared at her, unsure if I was supposed to say something comforting or just listen.

“I’m sorry,” I said eventually.

She shrugged. “I’m not. Not anymore. Just feels weird. Like… everything I built was a lie.”

I nodded. “Yeah. I get that.”

For a second, we stood there in silence. Two strangers clinging to pieces of truth. And maybe something else.

“Well,” she said finally, “see you around.”

I watched her walk away, her coffee still untouched.

That night, I painted again. But this time, I wasn’t trying to fix anything. I let the colors bleed where they wanted. I let the reds scream and the blacks swallow. And somewhere in the middle of that storm, I painted her — Ira. The curve of her neck, the sadness in her eyes, the quiet way she held her grief.

And for the first time in days, I felt okay.

Not good. Not healed.

Just… okay.

And sometimes, okay was enough.