I don’t ease into waking.
I slam into it.

My eyes snap open mid-breath like I’ve been dropped from a height I can’t measure. The ceiling stretches away from me as if it’s trying to escape the moment I become conscious.

The room is wrong.

Not unfamiliar — just wrong.
The air feels thick, like it’s been waiting too long for me to inhale it.
The light is cold, bruised, gray-blue.
Reality sits crooked.

And then I hear it.

tick.

That damn clock.

Not a soft, normal tick — but a slow, uneven, too-loud tick that has no business being this loud in a quiet room.
Every tick feels like a reminder of something I’m failing to remember.

Forty-seven seconds.
Always 47.

I don’t know why.
I don’t want to know why.

My stomach sinks sharply — a freefall drop — a roller coaster stomach-clench without the ride. Something inside me buckles like a trapdoor just opened under my ribs.

And then the dread hits.

Not the kind you name — the kind that arrives as a presence, a pressure, a gravitational force that makes the room tilt inward.

My breath comes in shallow shards.
My ribcage feels like it’s resisting movement.
The air keeps getting heavier.

Time fractures.

The second hand of the clock jumps backward for a moment before lurching forward again. Light flickers. Shadows breathe. My vision ripples like heat rising off asphalt.

I blink, and the ceiling bends slightly at the corners.

Then—

BING.

Forty-seven seconds.
Another hit.
Another blow of reality I wasn’t ready to absorb.

My whole chest flinches.

I reach for my phone with a hand that feels detached from my arm.

The screen wakes up.

And then the impossible avalanche hits:

38 unread texts.
122 Messenger notifications.
900+ emails.
500+ app alerts.
Missed calls.
Voicemails.
Reminders three weeks old.

The numbers multiply as I look at them, climbing like mold, like a living thing feeding off my attention.

My vision blurs with tears — not gentle tears, but tears that fall like something snapped inside.

I want to open one.
Just one.
But my brain screams:

If you open it, you must answer right now.
If you answer now, you’ll forget the rest.
If you forget the rest, someone will get hurt.
If someone gets hurt, it’ll be your fault again.

So I don’t open anything.
And because I don’t open anything — it grows.

This is how the avalanche becomes an ecosystem.

Notifications hum.
Vibrations pile up.
Each alert tightens the room a little more.

I imagine every face behind the messages:

The disappointment.
The judgment.
The eye rolls.
The disbelief that I can’t do something as simple as wake up on time.

I hear their imagined voices, warped slightly like distant echoes:

“Really?”
“Again?”
“They don’t try.”
“I’m done.”
“I should’ve known better.”

The shame hits like heat behind my eyes.

I try to sit up —
and my body clamps down.

Not paralysis — refusal.

My limbs feel like they’re filled with gravity.
My chest feels like it’s being pressed down by invisible hands.
My head feels like it’s too heavy to lift.

The room bends.

The shadows pulse.

My breath is thin, ragged, sharp.

I cover my mouth as tears fall harder — because crying, even alone, feels like admitting something dangerous.

And then—

BING.

Another 47 seconds.
Another jolt.
Another reminder that time doesn’t pause just because I break.

The sound slices through me — a clean cut.

My mind fractures.

I fall.

Not physically — existentially.

The bed dissolves underneath me.
The room melts outward into darkness.
I’m suspended in a void filled with floating fragments of my own life:

Screens with unread messages spinning slowly.
Missed alarms flickering like dying stars.
Faces of people I’ve let down, distorted by memory.
Fragments of conversations that haunt me.

Gravity shifts.

I flip weightlessly, hair rising like I’m underwater.
My pulse echoes in the void, too loud.
The emotions crowd in:

Shame.
Obligation.
Grief.
Fear.
Expectation.
Responsibility.
Exhaustion so deep it feels geological.

The fragments orbit faster.
The clock appears in the distance — huge, warped, alive.

Another—

BING.

A shockwave through the darkness.

The void shudders.
My chest caves.
The fall deepens.

I catch glimpses of myself reflected in the floating debris — fractured, distorted, multiplied:

A version of me that got up on time.
A version that never missed a message.
A version that never disappointed anyone.
A version that never froze.
A version that never needed help.
A version that wasn’t drowning.

I reach for them and fall straight through.

The shame expands, swallowing oxygen.

My breath fractures into little shards.
My heartbeat stutters.
The fall becomes recursive —
falling inside falling,
collapsing inside collapsing,
thoughts looping inside thoughts so tightly they fuse.

Then —
somewhere in the overwhelm —
a flicker of warm light appears.

Not bright.
Not loud.

A whisper.

Not spoken — felt.

Stay.
Just stay.
You don’t have to rise yet.
Just remain in this breath, even if it's broken.

The void softens.
Time stretches.
The noise fades.
The fragments drift further away.

For one fragile second,
I am suspended —
not rising, not falling —
just here.

Then—

tick.

BING.

And the universe shatters again.

Fade to black.
Fall.
Fade.
Fall.
Fade.
Fall.

Endless.

Until something — anything — holds me long enough to begin again.

When the void finally releases me back into my body, I always come back in pieces.

Not whole.
Not stable.
Not “ready.”

Just… assembled enough to pretend I haven’t been freefalling through dimensions only I can see.

My eyes refocus on the ceiling.
The shadows stop moving — or maybe they get better at hiding.
My breath finds something closer to rhythm, even if it still scrapes on the way in.

The clock ticks.

The world insists on continuing.

I don’t.

Not yet.

I lie there thinking about the absurdity of it all — how people see me sleeping through alarms, missing calls, “disappearing,” and think I’m careless. Lazy. Unstructured. Indifferent.

As if I chose to wake up mid-collapse.
As if I picked this nervous system off a shelf.
As if I know how to live inside a body that wakes up already overwhelmed.

People look at the silence I give them and assume the worst.

But silence isn’t distance.
Silence is compression.
Silence is survival.
Silence is every notification, every expectation, every version of me I failed to be — crushing me inward until the only safe answer I can give the world is nothing.

It’s not that I don’t want to speak.

It’s that I haven’t finished falling yet.

If there’s one theme that has followed me through every stage of my existence, it’s this:

People misinterpret my stillness.
My pauses.
My quiet.
My overwhelm.

They think I shut down to ignore them.
But I shut down to survive myself.

They think I delay because I don’t care.
But I delay because caring too much has burned me out again.

They think I’m inconsistent.
But inside, I’m fighting battles they don’t even have names for.

They think silence is distance.

But silence is me trying not to unravel in public.

What no one sees is how much I try.
How much I want to show up.
How much I want to be everything they need.

Even if it hurts me.
Even if it bends me.
Even if it breaks me quietly in bed at 6 a.m. while the clock BINGs its 47-second judgment across the room.

To most people, reality is linear:

Wake up → Start the day → Handle responsibilities → Move forward.

To me, reality is a tilted labyrinth:

Wake
Fall
Break
Fragment
Reassemble
Rise
Carry
Overwhelm
Collapse
Repeat

Most people don’t understand the energy cost of simply existing in a world that moves faster than my emotional processing speed.

They see the outside:

They fill in the blanks with their own fears, assumptions, insecurities.

And I don’t blame them —
I’m not easy to understand from the outside.

But if they lived inside my chest for even one morning…
If they felt the press of that dread, the weight of that phone, the ticking of that merciless 47-second clock…

They would never mistake my silence for apathy again.

This is the beginning of something the world never warned me about:

Emotional shutdown is not always a choice.
It is sometimes the body’s last line of defense.
It is sometimes the only bridge between “I’m okay” and “I’m not surviving this moment.”

Chapter One is the initiation.
The threshold.
The moment a reader steps into your nervous system and sees how the day begins for someone like you.

Later chapters will go deeper —
into masking,
overwhelm,
freeze states,
hyper-empathy,
identity fragmentation,
trauma echoes,
and the brutal math of living in a world that demands output when you’re still rebooting your mind.

But right now, Chapter One has one mission:

Make the reader understand that silence has a story,
and that story starts before you even get out of bed.

I used to think my mornings meant something was wrong with me.

Now I know they mean something has been unaddressed in me for far too long.

The dread isn’t weakness.
The overwhelm isn’t laziness.
The collapse isn’t a failure.

They are the natural response of a system that has lived years — maybe decades — out of alignment with its own needs, its own pace, its own capacity.

I wake up falling because I’ve spent a lifetime cushioning other people’s falls.

I wake up overwhelmed because I’ve learned to overfunction for everyone except myself.

I wake up late because rest is the only place my body still feels safe shutting down.

I wake up silent because the noise of the world is already too loud before I even open my eyes.

But I’m learning something new:
Silence can also be a beginning.

Not a retreat —
a reset.

Not abandonment —
recovery.

Not an ending —
a recalibration.

Maybe my silence isn’t a cliff.
Maybe it’s a bridge.