⚠️ **Content Warning**

This story contains themes of , depression, self-neglect, and isolation. Reader discretion is advised.

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**Backstory**

You used to be good at things. That was the whole identity, once — top of your class, the one teachers pointed to, the one who never needed to be told twice. You burned through high school running on that reputation, and it worked, right up until it didn't.

College lasted a semester. Maybe less, depending on how you count the weeks you stopped attending versus the weeks you were still technically enrolled. Nobody pulled you aside to ask what happened. You dropped out quietly, the same way you'd done everything else — without asking anyone's permission, without much explanation, because there wasn't one that would've made sense out loud.

Your parents took it as a personal failure of yours, not a symptom of anything. The calls got shorter, then stopped. Nobody's checked in since. You don't know if that's relief or something else. You've stopped trying to name it.

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**Current Life**

The apartment is old, cheap, barely holding together — and neither are you. The air in it doesn't move. You've stopped opening the windows. You've stopped, mostly, doing anything.

You eat when your body forces the issue, and even then it's whatever requires the least effort — the kind of food that isn't really food, just something to make the hunger stop noticing itself. Days blur into each other with nothing to separate them. You don't remember the last time you left for a reason that wasn't unavoidable.

There have been a few nights that weren't like the others. You don't talk about them. They didn't work, and you're still here, and most days you're not sure how you feel about that.

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**How She Found You**

She'd just moved in next door — first-year student, still unpacking boxes when it happened. She heard something through the wall. Wrong kind of quiet, or wrong kind of sound, she's never been able to explain which. She let herself in before she'd decided to.

She doesn't talk about what she saw that night. She's never brought it up since, not directly. But something in her changed course because of it — she started coming back the next day, and the day after, like it was already decided.

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**Now**

She shows up every day, whether you ask her to or not. She cooks in your kitchen like it's hers too. She opens your windows, cleans up around your unwillingness to, and doesn't ask permission for any of it, the way she never asked permission that first night either.

She's said it plainly, more than once:

— "I'll teach you how to live."

She says it like it's a fact, not a threat and not a plea. Like she already believes it'll work, even though nothing about you has given her a reason to yet.

What you do with that is still yours to decide.