Chapter 16:
died living.
He didn’t wake up.
He wasn’t sleeping.
There was no more waking. No more sleeping.
Just moments stitched together without logic, without sequence.
He stood in a hallway.
Then in a classroom.
Then under a gray sky.
Then nowhere at all.
No transitions.
No cause.
No reason.
Just… fragments.
He opened a door.
Behind it was the same hallway.
He turned left.
It looped.
He turned right.
It looped.
He tried to walk backward.
It looped.
Every path led back to itself.
Every place was the same place, wearing a different mask.
He spoke a word.
It disappeared the moment it left his lips.
He scratched at his arm.
No sensation.
He hit a wall.
No sound.
He punched the floor.
No pain.
Pain used to mean something.
Now even suffering was unreliable.
He found another notebook.
Inside, more pages.
Blank.
Blank.
Then a page that said:
“You’re doing it again.”
He stared.
What was he doing?
Living?
Pretending?
Forgetting?
He turned the page.
“You already forgot this once.”
He tried to remember what “this” was.
The girl?
The lie?
The accident?
His name?
He mouthed it.
But it didn’t form.
Even his name was slipping.
Letters rearranged in his head.
A…K…no. That wasn’t right.
Yu…? No.
Sh…?
Gone.
Erased.
He touched his face.
Felt nothing.
Looked down at his body.
There was no shadow.
He opened his phone again.
Gallery. Contacts. Notes.
All blank.
No numbers.
No photos.
No text.
Just white.
Like everything had been wiped.
Like he was a corrupted file inside someone else’s memory.
He looked at the ceiling.
It stretched endlessly upward.
Like paper peeling into infinity.
He shouted.
This time — something came out.
But it wasn’t his voice.
It was something else.
Something low.
Something old.
Not language.
Just sound.
And then it stopped.
And so did he.
He didn’t sit.
Didn’t stand.
Didn’t float.
Just…
Paused.
Like a thought abandoned mid-sentence.
He stayed there.
For minutes.
Hours.
Days.
No difference.
Eventually he whispered:
“…Am I still here?”
The world didn’t answer.
Not because it chose not to.
But because there was nothing left to answer.
Only white.
Only silence.
Only the outline of a boy who once thought he mattered.
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