Dissolving

Trigger Warning: This story contains elements of physical violence and bullying.

I wake up with the taste of iron in my mouth. Almost as if I bit my tongue in the middle of the night. Everything’s quiet. The kind you hope for on a Saturday morning — this is wrong. Hollow. Too still, like the world forgot to hit play today.

My head aches. Not like a normal headache — it’s… deeper. Like something behind my eyes is pulsing. I sit up and realize I’m still in my jeans, my shoes, even my hoodie. Damp. Cold. Like I slept in a puddle or—

No. That doesn’t make sense.

I swing my legs over the bed, but I don’t feel the floor. Not really. It’s there, but I feel… lighter. Like I’m floating just a few inches above it.

Something happened.

I remember the party — the music, the lights, the way my heart had been thudding in my chest because Joey invited me. Joey.

He smiled at me in math class a few months ago and just like that, I wasn’t invisible anymore. I’d spent so long blending into locker doors and hallway corners. I knew what they called me. The names. The slurs. The whispers they didn’t bother whispering. I stopped crying about it in freshman year.

But Joey saw me.

He sat next to me at lunch. Laughed at my jokes. Said I had good taste in music. I always knew this. He told me about this party — his party — and for once, I wasn’t watching life through people’s windows. I was invited in.

But… what happened?

I step out into the hallway and everything feels… off. The light is dim, like it’s raining outside, but I check the window — blue skies. No rain.

I walk downstairs, expecting Mom to shout something about breakfast or being late for school, but the kitchen is empty. Coffee cup still full. The smell of bacon, burnt. The radio isn’t playing.

I leave the house anyway. I walk to school, but it feels like the world is underwater.

No one waves at me. Not even the crossing guard who always tries to talk about the Panthers. He’s not even there. Just a flickering traffic light and a crow watching me from a wire.

And when I get to school… it’s worse.

People are crying. Some are huddled in corners, whispering. Even the jocks — the ones who call me “fairy” in the locker room — look shaken. There’s a counselor in the lobby.

I try to ask someone what’s going on. I say Hey. Hey, what happened? But no one turns. Not one single person even looks at me.

It’s like I’m not even—here.

I try the classrooms next. Maybe someone will finally answer me. Maybe this is all just some freak dream I’m trapped in — one of those stress dreams where no one listens, and your voice doesn’t work and—

I push open the door to Mr. Talbot’s English class.

Everyone is seated. Quiet. Too quiet for Talbot. He’s the kind of guy who claps his hands for attention and says things like “Let’s stir the pot today, kids.” But today, he just stands there, staring at nothing.

Joey’s in the back row.

My chest tightens when I see him. I don’t know why — it’s like my body remembers something before my brain does.

I move toward him. Fast. I grab his shoulder and say his name. Nothing. I wave my hands in front of his face. Still nothing.

He looks… wrecked. His jaw is clenched, his eyes rimmed red. Like he hasn’t slept in days. Pale. Gray. Like he’s seen a ghost. The life drained from his face.

I flinch at that thought. And then I hear it.

“…they said they found him this morning. Down by the river.”

My head snaps to the side. It’s Lucy Marks. Her voice is low but sharp, slicing through the fog of my thoughts. She’s whispering behind a trembling hand to the girl next to her. Her mascara’s streaked like she’s been crying for hours.

“I can’t believe it. I saw him leave with Joey last night. I thought they were, like… a thing.”

The other girl scoffs. “Joey? No way. He’s not like that.”

And suddenly, I can’t move. Can’t breathe.

River.

Found.

Him.

No.

Me.

I stumble back into the hallway, knees buckling, the fluorescent lights overhead warping into streaks. My breath rattles but it’s not breath — it’s memory trying to force its way out of my chest.

And it does. Hard. The night comes back in pieces. Joey’s hand on my shoulder. His smile pulling me toward the woods behind the house.

“It’s quieter out here,” he said. “You trust me, right?”

I did. God, I did.

Then the others came. Faces I knew — faces that had shoved me, mocked me, spit at my shoes in the hallway. They were laughing. Phones out. Recording.

Someone grabbed my hoodie — yanked it over my head. Someone else tore my backpack off and dumped it out. My journal, my sketchbook — pages fluttering into the dirt like trash.

“Say it,” one of them sneered. “Say you like Joey. Say you want him.”

I remember the way Joey looked at me then. Like he didn’t know me. Like he didn’t know himself.

“I—I don’t—” I tried.

They started chanting. The slur. Over and over. I covered my ears, but they pulled my hands down. Oh no, it’s happening again.

And Joey…

He didn’t stop them. He laughed.

Not loud. Not wild. Just a small, broken laugh — that says I’d rather kill you than admit I’m one of you.

Mud under my feet. Cold water biting at my ankles.

One shove and I lose my balance. And then the river opened its mouth.

The thing no one tells you about dying like that — being swallowed by something as quiet as water — is how slow it feels.

Not like the movies. No screaming. No splashing. Just cold. So cold it burns.

And then… silence. But not the peaceful kind.

It’s a silence that presses, like the world is pushing its palm flat against your mouth. I remember sinking. The way the black water bloomed around me like ink in a glass of milk. I couldn’t see.

Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t scream.

And I remember thinking — This can’t be it. Not like this.

Not when I finally felt like I had something. Someone. Joey.

He was supposed to be the person who pulled me out. Not the one who pushed me in.

I waited for someone to save me. I kept waiting. Even when I couldn’t keep my head up anymore, I waited. I waited until the light disappeared and my lungs stopped begging.

I didn’t know how to swim.

I told him that once, offhand, at lunch. He laughed and said, “We’ll fix that. I’ll teach you.” He said it like it meant something. Maybe it did. Maybe that’s the part that hurts the most.

I don’t remember walking to the doors of the school. Only that one moment I’m still inside, and the next, my hand is on the metal bar of the school’s main exit near the courtyard of the school.

I push it open. The sky is gone.

That soft blue morning — the one that felt so off — is now pitch black. No stars. No moon. Just endless dark stretching in every direction.

Except for one place. A soft glow flickers in the distance. Small at first. Then larger. Moving. Alive. I follow it. I walk across the football field. Past the bleachers. Down the hill behind the gym.

And then I see it.

The vigil. An eerie feeling washes all over me. Immediately I know.

This is for me.

Candles everywhere — hundreds of them. Held in hands, resting in the grass, tucked beneath trembling chins. A sea of tiny flames, like the stars came down just for this.

They’ve gathered like they always do — for assemblies, for football games, for things that don’t matter. But this time, it’s for me.

They stand shoulder to shoulder, faces lambent in the candlelight, cast in shades of guilt and grief and something that looks a lot like performance. There are teachers I spent years trying to impress. Students who never once said my name out loud. Even the ones who stood there that night — who watched me slip beneath the surface while they laughed like it was a game.

Like I was a dare. Like I was disposable.

They chant my name like they knew me. Like they ever tried. They didn’t. Not when it counted.

And just beyond them — standing at the edge of the circle, not looking at anyone, not speaking — are the only two people who ever saw me.

My mom is clutching a framed photo of me — the one she kept on the hallway table, the one she always dusted even when she didn’t dust anything else. Her hands are shaking. Her lips are moving, soundlessly, like she’s still trying to pray the water back out of my lungs.

My dad’s arm is around her, but I can see it — the way he blinks fast and looks up at the sky like he’s begging it to take this all back. His other hand is holding my old denim jacket — the one with the frayed sleeve he sewed for me the night before freshman year because I said it made me feel brave.

They look so small now. So…lost. And all I want — more than anything — is to touch them. To wrap myself around them like they wrapped themselves around me every time the world turned too cruel.

They were my shield. Every time the teachers let the slurs slide, every time the kids whispered behind my back or laughed right to my face — they were the ones who stood between me and the world, reminding me I still mattered. If there is a God, I’ve never met Him. But I knew love. I saw it in the quiet way my mother sat beside me when I didn’t have the words. In the way my father held my silence without needing to fix it. And I think that’s the closest any of us ever get to being saved.

Now these people cry. These people who never really saw me. They cry for a version of me they get to pretend they knew.

I walk past Lucy, who once posted a TikTok calling me “that creepy gay kid who always smells like books.” Her mascara is smudged. Past Marcus, who shoved me into a locker freshman year and said he was doing me a favor by making me “tougher.” He’s on his knees. Past kids who never said a word to me — not one — now holding candles with my name printed on them in looping cursive like I was some story they’re allowed to rewrite.

Where were they? Where were any of them when I begged for someone to look — really look — and see that I was drowning long before I hit the water?

It took me dying for them to see I existed. And now they call it tragic. Now they say I mattered.

But I don’t believe them. Not when they let me fade without a sound. I step back from the crowd. Their sobs begin to blur. Candles flicker, their light unsteady. The night air curls around me like fog, heavy and cold.

And that’s when I see him.

Joey.

He isn’t with the others. He sits alone beneath the old oak tree at the edge of the hill, just far enough from the vigil to be hidden in shadow. His knees are pulled tightly to his chest, arms wrapped around them like he’s trying to hold the broken pieces together.

A journal rests in his lap — worn, leather-bound, frayed at the edges. Familiar.

He lifts his head, and I see the streaks of tears cutting down his face, catching the faint candlelight that barely reaches him. His hands tremble as he flips to a page, staring down like it might forgive him if he just looks hard enough.

I move closer.

The journal lies open, and though the ink is smudged and water-warped, I can still make out the last few lines:

“I loved him. And I had no way of telling him.”

“I let this happen to the one person that had the potential to make me truly happy.”

“And now, I will never have the chance to tell him.”

“I will never forgive myself for this Elijah, so I need you to.”

“Forgive me.”

For a moment, I stop breathing.

Something inside me ebbs — something that’s been clinging, clawing, screaming ever since the water dragged me under. It wasn’t hate that killed me. It was fear. And that fear still cost me everything.

My life. My future. My happiness. I was robbed of the chance to grow up. Fall in love. Make mistakes. And he’s still here and has all the things that were taken from me.

But when I look at him now — knees drawn in, hands trembling, the journal open like a wound in his lap — I don’t see the boy who laughed with the others. I don’t see the one who stood still while I begged the river not to take me.

I see the boy who loved me. A love I would never get to feel or experience in this lifetime. The boy who couldn’t bear what that meant — not out loud, not in front of them, not even to himself. And now he’s broken in a way that can’t be undone.

Not by candles. Not by silence. Not by time.

I step closer. Close enough to kneel beside him. I don’t know if he can feel the shift in the air, the sudden warmth that blooms around him.

But I whisper anyway.

“I forgive you.”

His head lifts, just slightly — as if he felt my words through him. A single tear falls and darkens the page.

A breeze stirs the grass around me. Warmer than the night. Softer than anything I’ve felt in… I don’t even know how long.

Light begins to gather — not from the candles, not from the moon — but from somewhere deeper. It brushes against my shoulders, wraps around my spine, seeps into the hollow places the river left behind. It lightly kisses my face.

It’s peaceful. I rise. I feel almost weightless. The air smells like spring rising — like riverbanks and lilacs and things that grow after ruin. The pain is gone. So is the ache. And the cold.

The light draws me forward — slow at first, asking, not demanding. Each step feels warmer. Lighter. For the first time, nothing hurts.

My life — the full weight of it — held in this one moment.

I let myself see it. Feel it. Be it.

For the first time, I don’t feel invisible.

For the first time, I am free.

Dedication

For anyone who feels unseen, unheard, or invisible — I see you. I love you. Don’t give up.

I didn’t. And I’m still here.

Because sometimes, the smallest act of kindness could be the only thing standing between someone’s life and their silence. So, see them. Defend them. Before it’s too late.