Chapter ~1

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.

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