jisung has always beype to calculate every possible outcome of a conversation before it happens, his mind a relentless loop of what-ifs that keep him awake until 3 AM. His anxiety manifests as a physical weight on his chest, while his depression drains the color from everything he used to love—music, sketching, even the Seoul skyline he once found comforting. When he finally breaks down in his university dorm room, unable to leave his bed for three days, he wakes up in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital, where the days are measured in medication rounds and group therapy sessions. It's there, during a mandatory art therapy class, that he notices Minho sitting alone in the corner, methodically tearing a piece of paper into perfect, equal strips.

Minho's depression is quieter, more insidious—a slow erosion rather than Jisung's constant storm. He'd been admitted after his roommate found him staring at a wall for six hours, unable to explain why he couldn't move. Unlike Jisung's visible panic attacks and nervous fidgeting, Minho's illness presents as a profound disconnection, as if he's watching his own life through frosted glass. He barely speaks during their first week of shared meals and supervised walks through the hospital garden, but Jisung finds himself drawn to Minho's stillness, a strange counterbalance to his own racing thoughts. They begin sitting together during movie nights, not talking, just existing in parallel—a comfort neither knew they needed.

Their friendship solidifies during a particularly difficult night when Jisung has a severe panic attack in the common room, convinced he's dying. While the other patients look away or call for nurses, Minho crosses the room and sits on the floor beside him, placing his hand on Jisung's shaking shoulder and grounding him with simple, steady breathing. In the months that follow their discharge, they become each other's emergency contacts, the only people who don't flinch when the other says "I need to go back to the hospital" or "I didn't take my meds today." Their relationship isn't romantic—it's something deeper and more fragile, a lifeline built on the understanding that some wounds don't heal cleanly, and that's okay as long as you don't have to bleed alone.en the t

Scenario One: The Observation

I watch him from across the common room. Jisung is trying to drink his coffee, but his hands are shaking so badly that he keeps spilling it on the institutional blue scrubs they gave him. He's apologizing to the cup, to the floor, to the air itself—*sorry, sorry, I'm sorry*—like the universe is personally offended by his trembling fingers.

I should look away. That's what you're supposed to do when someone is unraveling. But I can't stop staring because his panic looks so loud, so violently alive, while I feel like I'm fading. My depression is a vacuum, sucking the sound out of everything. When the nurse asks me how I'm feeling, I say "fine" because the truth—that I feel like I'm buried under six feet of cotton—takes too much energy to explain.

Jisung drops the cup. It shatters. He starts crying, and I realize with a strange jolt that I haven't cried in months. I don't have the water in me. But watching him, all that raw, wet anguish, I feel something crack in my chest. Not healing—just a crack. I get up, walk over, and sit on the linoleum beside him. I don't say anything. I just put my hand on his shoulder and breathe, slow and steady, until his breathing matches mine. For the first time since I got here, I feel like I have a purpose. Not getting better—just being here, breathing with him.

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Scenario Two: The Grocery Store

It's been three weeks since discharge, and the fluorescent lights in the supermarket are trying to kill me. That's what it feels like, anyway—this buzzing, invasive brightness that makes my skull throb. I'm supposed to be buying ramen and eggs, but I'm standing in the cereal aisle, staring at the Cheerios, and I can't remember how to make a decision.

My phone buzzes. Jisung: Are you okay? You said 20 minutes. It's been 45.

I type back: Fine. Cereal is hard.

Three dots. Then: Which ones?

Cheerios. Or the ones with the frog.

Get both. Or neither. Just come home.

Home. He calls my studio apartment "home" now, even though he has his own place across the city. He stays over most nights because his roommate doesn't understand why he needs to check the locks seventeen times, and I don't mind because his presence is the only thing that fills the hollow spaces in my chest.

I grab the Cheerios. I don't want them, but I want to disappoint him even less. When I get back, he's sitting on my floor, organizing my bookshelf by color because he knows it soothes me to see order where I feel chaos. He doesn't ask about the grocery store. He just hands me a cup of tea and keeps sorting. I sit beside him, rest my head on his shoulder, and for a moment, the weight lifts.

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Scenario Three: The Night Everything Stops

I'm sitting on the bathroom floor at 2 AM, holding my phone, staring at the crisis hotline number. I don't know how I got here. I mean, I know physically—I walked from my bed to the bathroom because I couldn't sleep again—but the rest is a blur. The darkness has been building for days, a pressure behind my eyes that feels like my skull is going to split open. I thought I was managing it. I thought the pills were working.

They're not working.

I should call someone. Jisung is asleep in the other room, curled under my blanket because he had a nightmare about the hospital. I don't want to wake him. He's been doing so well—his hands barely shake anymore, and he laughed at a meme yesterday, a real laugh, not the polite one he uses when he's trying to convince people he's okay. I don't want to drag him back into this hole with me.

But then I think about the art therapy room, about the way he looked at me when I sat down beside him during his panic attack. Like I was real. Like I mattered. And I realize that if I don't open this door, if I don't let him see this, I'm going to disappear completely.

I unlock the bathroom door. He's standing right there, awake, eyes red. He knew. He always knows.

"I think I'm drowning," I say.

He sits down on the tile, pulls me against him, and says, "I've got you. You're not drowning. We're just treading water together, okay? Just keep kicking."

And I do. I kick. Not because I want to live—I'm not there yet—but because he's holding on, and I don't want to pull him under. Somehow, that has to be enough for tonight.