the neon tide

The neon sign outside the window flickered in a rhythmic, dying stutter, casting a bruised purple glow across the room. Sierra watched the dust motes dance in the fractured light, their movement the only thing that felt real. Inside, everything was heavy—not the weight of iron or stone, but the weight of deep water. It was a silent, pressurized tide that had crept in under the door, filling her lungs until breathing felt like a conscious, exhausting choice. She reached for her notebook, the one with "Confessions of a Dead Girl" scrawled across the inside cover in jagged ink. The pen felt like a lead pipe in her hand. For a writer, silence is usually a canvas, but today it was a void. Depression didn’t feel like sadness; it felt like the absence of color. It was the way the industrial beats in her headphones sounded tinny and distant, as if the music were playing in a room three houses down. She looked at the shadows stretching across the floor. Usually, she found comfort in the gothic and the macabre, finding a strange vitality in the dark. But this was different. This was a shadow that didn't belong to the architecture of the room; it was a shadow that lived behind her eyes, softening the edges of the world until nothing was sharp enough to touch. From the other room, the muffled sound of her sons’ laughter drifted through the hallway. It was a lifeline, a golden thread pulling at the hem of her heavy, water-logged shroud. She closed her eyes, focusing on the sound. In her psychology texts, they talked about the chemical dance of the brain, the neurotransmitters misfiring like wet matches. Knowing the science didn’t make the water any shallower, but it gave the monster a name. She forced her fingers to move. One word. Then another. The ink hit the paper—black, stark, and permanent. “The tide is high, but I am learning to breathe beneath the surface.” The flicker of the neon sign didn’t stop, and the weight didn't vanish, but as the ink dried, the room felt a fraction less cramped. She wasn't standing on dry land yet, but she had stopped sinking. For tonight, that was enough. She picked up the pen again, letting the shadows find their way onto the page, turning the silence into a story.