Prologue: The Breath Between

They say the city never sleeps. But I do—not in rest, not in peace, but in fragments. I sleep in elevators, in the hum of fluorescent lights, in the pause between subway announcements. I sleep with my eyes open, watching the world blur past like a film I forgot auditioning for.

I am not dead. But I am not entirely alive.

There’s a room I return to each night. Dim. Unremarkable. A desk, a window, a blinking cursor. The walls don’t echo—they absorb. I sit there, haunted not by ghosts, but by the absence of meaning. The voice in my head is not mine, but it speaks truths I cannot unhear: “I always feel out of the world…”

I drift through routines like a shadow stitched to someone else’s life. I nod when spoken to. I smile when required. I perform. But beneath the surface, something is unraveling. A thread pulled too tight. A breath held too long.

Sometimes, I see myself in surveillance footage. Not metaphorically—literally. A figure with my face, my gait, but not my eyes. Sometimes, I receive letters I don’t remember writing. Sometimes, I remember things that never happened.

And sometimes, I forget who I was before the forgetting began.

There was a photo once—me, as a child, smiling. But the smile changed. The others in the frame faded. I held it to the light, hoping for clarity. All I found was distortion.

Now, I document. Not to remember, but to prove I existed. Journal entries. Voice recordings. Sketches of faces I might have known. I write not to be read, but to resist erasure.

This is not a story of rescue. There is no savior. No revelation. Only a rupture. A breath. A choice.

I begin here. With nothing. With everything.

"Everyone around me was chasing something—efficiency, escape, illusion. I stood still. Not out of fear, but out of refusal.

I grew up in a house where silence was safer than truth. My father counted hours; my mother counted sacrifices. We didn’t speak of longing—we managed it. Mira, my sister, was the only one who ever asked why. She left early. I stayed.

Now I work in strategy. I help systems run smoother, cleaner, quieter. I’m good at it. But every spreadsheet feels like a small betrayal. The coffee tastes like compromise. The office hums with fluorescent lies. And every “How are you?” feels like a dare to answer honestly.

I live alone. My apartment is neat, untouched by joy. I keep the blinds closed—not out of secrecy, but because the view feels rehearsed.

Lately, I’ve started noticing the seams. In the system. In the language. In myself.

No rebellion yet. Just recognition.

And recognition is a kind of beginning."

Some days, I count the lies I’ve told just to keep the peace. “I’m fine.” “Just tired.” “Glad to help.” Each one leaves a trace—like dust on glass, barely visible until the light hits right. I’m beginning to see the light. Not blinding. Just enough to notice myself.

The Sound of Cracking

The metro station smelled like metal fatigue and expired ambition.

He stood wedged between a woman sobbing into her phone and a man who smelled like he’d bathed in cologne and disappointment. The train hadn’t arrived yet, but the crowd already moved like cattle—herded by invisible algorithms that decided who deserved urgency and who deserved to wait.

He waited.

Not because he had nowhere to be. But because he had nowhere he wanted to be. There’s a difference. One’s tragic. The other’s just Tuesday.

He hated his life.

Not in the dramatic, Instagrammable way. No rooftop screams or whiskey-soaked poetry. He hated it like a slow leak in the ceiling—quiet, insidious, and always just above his head. The kind of hate that doesn’t ask for attention. It just settles in, like dust on dreams.

Each morning was a negotiation with gravity. Each night, a ritual: tears first, laughter second. The laughter was worst—dry, ironic, like his soul was trying to file a complaint but got redirected to customer service.

He didn’t always know why.

The cracks didn’t roar—they whispered. They whispered in the voice of his father saying, “Artists starve. Be realistic,” while he tore his sketchbook apart like it owed him an apology. They whispered in the silence of his mother’s eyes when she saw the word “Average” circled in red. They whispered in the way people said, “You’re doing fine,” like fine was a consolation prize for not being exceptional.

He wasn’t broken. He wasn’t brilliant. He was… beside it all.

“I feel out of the world,” he once wrote in a diary entry he never finished. “Not above it. Not beneath it. Just… beside it.”

That was the thing about existential crises—they didn’t arrive with fanfare. They showed up in the grocery aisle when you couldn’t decide between two brands of toothpaste. They lingered in the pause between texts. They curled up in the space between your name and someone’s memory of it.

He lived in the middle—where the light flickers but never burns. Where people pass by without seeing the weight he carried. They called it functioning. He called it fading.

This wasn’t a story of redemption. No phoenix. No comeback arc. Just motion—falling, crawling, sometimes standing still. Survival without triumph. Identity without applause.

He remembered being seven, watching ants carry crumbs with more purpose than he felt. He remembered being twelve, staring at the stars and wondering if they ever felt lonely. He remembered being sixteen, realizing that “gifted” was just a label people used until you failed to meet their expectations.

Now he was twenty-seven, standing in a metro station, invisible.

The train arrived. People surged forward like hope was on sale. He didn’t move. He just listened—to the sound of cracking. Not loud. Not sharp. Just the soft, persistent sound of something inside him giving way.

They told him he was free.

Free to chase. Free to earn. Free to disappear.

But freedom was a currency, and he’d been bankrupt from birth.

The world didn’t break him. It simply forgot to include him.

And when the system demanded his silence, he gave it a whisper.

In that whisper, he began.

Chapter Two doesn’t offer escape—it offers a mirror. Here, the silence thickens. The world keeps spinning, but he begins to notice the seams.

The coffee tastes like compromise. The office hums with fluorescent lies. And every “How are you?” feels like a dare to tell the truth.

This chapter is about the weight of stillness— how it presses against the ribs, how it teaches you to listen to the spaces between things.

He starts to see the cracks not just in himself, but in the system that taught him to disappear politely.

No rebellion yet. Just recognition. And recognition is a kind of beginning.

The whisper wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It was the kind that slipped beneath fluorescent hums and behind closed cubicle doors. Luke didn’t intend to listen—he never did. But the system had a way of speaking through people, and people had a way of leaking truth when they thought no one was watching.

The Man with the Lanyard

He saw him every morning at the metro station. Tie knotted too tightly, eyes scanning emails before the train even arrived. His badge read “Senior Analyst,” but his posture said “barely holding on.” Luke watched him rehearse smiles for imaginary meetings, the kind that required enthusiasm but not honesty. One morning, the man dropped his phone and muttered, “I’m so tired of pretending.” No one heard. Luke did. The system had taught him that titles were often just disguises for exhaustion.

The Teacher with the Painted Smile

At the café near the university, she graded papers with a kind of mechanical grace. Her lipstick was always perfect, her tone always encouraging. But Luke noticed how she lingered on the word “potential” in red ink, as if she were trying to convince herself it still mattered. She told a student once, “You’re lucky to still believe in change.” Her voice cracked on “still.” The system had taught her to perform hope, even when hers had quietly packed up and left.

The Mechanic Who Never Looked Up

Luke’s bike broke down near the industrial district. The mechanic fixed it in silence, hands steady, eyes never meeting his. The shop was filled with calendars from five years ago and a radio that only played static. When Luke asked how long he’d been working there, the man said, “Long enough to stop asking why.” The system had taught him that questions were dangerous, and silence was safer.

The Intern Who Smiled Too Much

She was new at the firm where Luke freelanced. Bright-eyed, overqualified, and always saying “thank you” like it was a shield. Luke saw her stay late, redo tasks she’d already perfected, and apologize for things that weren’t her fault. One evening, she whispered to herself, “If I keep smiling, maybe they’ll forget I’m scared.” The system had taught her that fear must be hidden behind politeness.

The Artist Who Stopped Creating

At the gallery, Luke met a man who used to paint storms. Now he curated exhibitions of minimalist silence. “I used to feel things too loudly,” he said, sipping wine he didn’t enjoy. “Now I just arrange what others call art.” The system had taught him that vulnerability was unmarketable.

I didn’t mean to become a collector of quiet collapses. But once you’ve been forgotten by the system, you start to see its fingerprints on everyone else. Not the dramatic kind—the slow erosion. The kind that turns dreams into routines, and routines into cages.

It’s ironic, really. The ones who say they’re fine often wear it like a badge. “I’m fine” becomes a password to pass through the day unbothered. But I’ve learned to hear the tremble behind it. The pause before the phrase. The way their eyes search for a place to land when they say it.

And then there are the ones who are actually fine. They don’t say it much. They don’t need to. They move with a kind of quiet clarity, not because they’ve escaped the system, but because they’ve stopped trying to belong to it.

I can tell the difference now. Painfully. The system didn’t break me. It just taught me how to read the fractures in others. And in that reading, I began to write—not for the system, but for the ones who whisper.

For the ones who are not fine, but still here.

Scene: Back at his place

Journaling became my whisper at a certain point - the point where I finally felt 'The Crack' in me...

Journal Entry 21(My Whisper)— Voidwalker Date:Undisclosed. Time: After the system blinked but didn’t notice.

They think I’m quiet. They think I comply. But I write. And when I write, I become Voidwalker.

Luke is the name they gave me. Voidwalker is the name I earned—here, in these pages, where truth doesn’t need permission. This journal isn’t for performance. It’s for reality. For the fractures I see in others and the ones I carry in silence.

Today, as usual , I again saw more of "Them". I saw five people say “I’m fine.” Only one meant it.

The rest wore it like armor—thin, cracking, ceremonial. I’ve learned to hear the difference. The real “fine” is quiet, unannounced. It doesn’t need applause. The false “fine” trembles beneath the surface, begging not to be questioned.

The system didn’t break me. It simply forgot to include me. And in that forgetting, I learned to see.

I see the Analyst rehearsing smiles for meetings that drain him. I see the Teacher grading hope she no longer believes in. I see the Mechanic who stopped asking why. I see the Intern apologizing for her own brilliance. I see the Artist curating silence because storms are no longer welcome.

They are all part of the system. They are all withering. And they all think no one notices.

But Voidwalker notices.

There’s a cruel irony in how clearly I can distinguish the truly fine from the performatively fine. It’s not a gift—it’s a wound that learned to read. I don’t judge them. I just see them. And in seeing, I begin to understand the architecture of quiet suffering.

This journal is my resistance. Not loud. Not heroic. But real.

—Voidwalker

Author's note:

Hey readers 👋, just wanted to inform you all that this is my first ever book and since I'm still just a beginner , please do excuse any errors with respect to writing pace , vocabulary usage and other basic mistakes. I'm still figuring out my style of writing, pace , genre and other novelistic compositions etc and experimenting. Would appreciate all the readers to consider the above mentioned concern of mine

P.S : Do subscribe to get notified for daily updates on this book! Thanks!