Chapter 1: Glitter and Silence

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.

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