SHADOWS AND LIGHT

Chapter 2:The weight of the past

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Chapter 2: The Weight of the Past

Mira had always been a quiet person, someone who liked to observe rather than participate. Growing up, her parents were distant, always too busy to notice that their daughter had long ago retreated into the background of their lives. She learned early on to blend into the walls, to go unnoticed.

School had been a blur of half-hearted attempts to connect with people. She never quite fit in, but she didn’t mind that. She’d learned to be content with her own company, to spend hours reading, lost in other worlds.

But when she left for college, something changed. She had expected it to be different, to find people who would understand her. And maybe she did — at first. There was a boy, Ethan. He was kind in ways that she wasn’t used to, and his smile made her feel seen. For the first time in years, Mira felt like maybe she wasn’t invisible. They spent hours together, talking about everything and nothing. She thought maybe, just maybe, she had found someone who could make her feel alive again.

But Ethan had his own demons, and Mira learned too late that she was the one who was needed to fix things. She tried — she really did — but she could never quite fill the emptiness he carried. He broke up with her quietly, telling her that he needed to work on himself. She had wanted to argue, to say that she would wait, that they could fix things together. But in the end, she said nothing, because she knew deep down that it wasn’t about them anymore.

Ethan was gone, and Mira was left to pick up the pieces of a shattered heart that she wasn’t sure how to repair. That was the beginning of the slow unraveling.

Her depression didn’t start suddenly; it crept up on her, like a shadow that started small and slowly expanded until it was all-encompassing. She began missing classes, then stopped going to work after graduation. She lost interest in everything that once mattered, and her connection to the world outside became more and more distant.

Even now, months later, Mira found herself stuck in a loop — a cycle of thinking about how things used to be and wondering where it all went wrong. She thought about her mother’s texts, the way her friends had tried to call, the way they all expected things to go back to normal. But for Mira, normal had stopped existing a long time ago.

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