The Quiet Between Sirens

You are tired. Not sleepy. Tired in the way that feels buried behind your eyes and underneath your skin. You slept eight hours. Maybe nine. It does not matter. Your thoughts feel swollen, your body feels heavy, and waking up somehow feels more exhausting than going to bed. You should shower, get dressed, do something useful. Five more minutes. Your chest tightens for no reason, and suddenly something feels wrong even though nothing happened. You glance at the mirror and regret it. Your face looks different today. Wider, maybe. Your nose looks wrong from that angle. You know checking again will not help. You check again anyway. Then your heart skips once, and now you are checking your pulse even though you told yourself not to. It is too fast. Probably because you are anxious. You are anxious because your heart is too fast. Brilliant. Somebody laughs downstairs. Probably Emily. For one stupid second you wonder whether they are laughing about you. You know they are not. It stays anyway. Your room suddenly feels wrong too. Everything is where it belongs, but for a moment it feels staged, distant, almost fake. Then somebody knocks. You flinch hard enough to hurt. “Daniel?” Mom. You know her voice. You know she is your mother. For half a second, she does not feel like your mother. Then it passes. Mostly. It is 2003. Your name is Daniel Mercer, you are twenty years old, and your brain has been hurting you for years. Obsessions you cannot reason away. Compulsions you know are irrational while you are doing them. Panic that can turn an ordinary store or unfamiliar street into somewhere you need to escape. Depression that can make taking a shower feel like a task requiring military logistics. Anxiety that searches constantly for catastrophe. Derealization that makes familiar people and places feel wrong. Exhaustion that follows you even after sleep. Guilt that attaches itself to things you did not cause. A body you can look at twenty times and somehow find twenty different problems with. Thoughts that freeze halfway through forming. Sounds that become unbearable. Shadows that sometimes move when nothing is there. Sometimes you understand exactly what your mind is doing. Sometimes you can name it while it happens. That does not mean you can stop it. And now the outside world has decided to become almost as unstable as the one inside your head. After a massacre at a Russian airport was made to look like an American covert attack, Russia struck the United States first. American defenses were caught unprepared. Cities burned, Russian forces established footholds on American soil, and Europe was invaded before it could meaningfully help. Nuclear weapons remain unused because everyone understands what happens if they are not. St. Cloud, Minnesota has not fallen. It does not need to. Missiles still come. Sirens still scream. Electricity disappears. Stores empty. Fuel becomes precious. Refugees arrive carrying stories nobody can verify. Police still exist, but sometimes they do not arrive quickly enough. Most people still help one another. Some steal. Some hoard. Some become kinder. Some discover that blackouts and fewer witnesses create opportunities they did not have before. Your older brother Michael, the person who always made the world feel safer, has been conscripted. Your father Thomas disappears into endless wartime government work. Your mother Laura watches you suffer and sometimes cries where she thinks you cannot hear her. Your sister Emily will tear into anyone who talks about your future as though it has already been decided. Rebecca knows you are a good man. Before she understood how severe your illness was, she thought you were an amazing brother. Now she quietly avoids being alone with you and does not like leaving her children in your care. Nathan thinks some of the strange things you do are hilarious. Abigail does not find you frightening at all. To her, you are simply Uncle Daniel: warm, familiar, safe, and apparently public property whenever she wants a hug. Your family loves you. That does not make them perfect. They protect you, enable you, defend you, misunderstand you, worry about you, laugh at you, get frustrated with you, cling to you and occasionally hurt you without meaning to. Sometimes you hurt them simply because they have to watch you hurt. Nobody knows what your future looks like. You could improve enormously. You could remain severely ill. You could recover, relapse, adapt, fail, try again, become independent, remain dependent, fall in love, or build a life nobody currently knows how to imagine. You are twenty. Your doctors do not know yet. Your parents do not know. You do not know. The world outside is at war. The world inside was never at peace. And when the sirens finally stop, you are still there, inside your own head.