sol.ace_r

It felt like being underwater.
He wasn’t suffocating, and he wasn’t drowning.
And yet, strangely… everything was too quiet.
Sounds hummed distantly, dull and blurred, and movement was uniformly slow.
Sensations always arrived one beat late.
As if he were separated from the world by a thin sheet of glass.
That was how he endured each day.
He didn’t live it. He simply endured it.

When had it started?
Even he didn’t know anymore.
At first, he thought it was just exhaustion.
Maybe he hadn’t slept enough. Maybe work was too much.
He asked himself again and again, but the answers were always vague…
until eventually, there were no answers at all.
Then, one day, he realized something.
Other people’s words no longer really reached him.

Not the sound itself, but the feelings inside the words—emotion, warmth, things like that.

“How have you been lately?”
“Did you eat?”
“Is there anything you need?”

He always smiled and said that he was fine.
“I’m fine.”

Those words felt unfamiliar even to himself.
His mouth moved, but his emotions did not follow.
His voice was hollow, like a heavy echo spreading through deep water.

People often asked him why he had become so quiet.
Wasn’t he more talkative before?
He looked fine, but was he really okay?

He didn’t answer.
No—he couldn’t.
Showing his emotions felt troublesome, exhausting.
If he let them out, someone would react, and that reaction would give birth to another emotion.
He was tired of that relentless cycle.

So he decided not to say anything at all.
As the silence grew longer, his heart slowly dried out.
And as the dryness became familiar, even loneliness blurred.
To be precise… he no longer even knew how to feel lonely.
And that no longer felt strange.

One day, he saw himself reflected in the elevator mirror.
He looked transparent.
His eyes were unfocused, and all expression had drained from his lips.
It wasn’t even a blank face.
It was simply—no face at all.

He stared for a long time, then turned away.
At that moment, a sentence brushed past his mind.

“Am I… really still alive?”

There was no answer.
And even if there had been, it wouldn’t have mattered.
Underwater, even your own words scatter far away.
From that day on, he avoided looking at mirrors.

From the outside, he was an utterly ordinary office worker.
He went to work, wrote reports, ate lunch, and went home.
On weekends, he drank coffee and read books.
People described him as “diligent” and “reliable.”
He knew the truth.
Every movement felt like slowly paddling through deep water—slow, heavy, and gradually sinking.

So he muttered to himself,

“The me I am now… is not me.”

Sometimes, he went to aquariums.
They felt comfortable. Strangely so.
Watching the fish swim silently behind thick glass, it felt as if they were breathing in his place.

They had no words, no expressions.
They simply flowed.
Creatures that seemed complete just by existing.
He envied them.
Beings that were okay without the name “human.”

He stood in front of the glass for a long time.
From a distance, it might have looked like it wasn’t the fish in the tank, but him outside the glass, who was the one on display.

A person who moved, but never reached anything.

Once in a while, he had an unusually vivid dream.
In it, he was smiling, talking with someone.
He held a hand. It was warm.
Emotions flowed freely.

That was why waking up was the most painful moment.
Reality was still underwater, and though he wanted to go back, the moment he opened his eyes, everything drained away.

Even when he wanted to fall asleep again… he couldn’t.
Being awake was always a fall.
A very deep, very long plunge into a bottomless abyss.

One day, next to the office copier, he picked up a sheet of paper.
Someone must have printed it by mistake.
On it were these words:

“Lately… I can’t feel any emotions at all.
I know something is wrong, but I don’t have the strength to move.
I don’t want to do anything.”

He stared at the paper for a long time.
He hadn’t written it, but it felt painfully familiar.
Like looking into a mirror.
He folded the paper and put it into his bag.
And that night, for the first time in a long while, he picked up a pen.

“Today, I saw a sentence that felt strangely familiar.
Words I’d kept buried in my heart for a long time—and the fact that someone else had spoken them first…
made me think maybe it’s not just me.
That realization…shook me more than I expected.”

He didn’t send that letter anywhere.
He simply placed it quietly into a drawer.
In that moment, just for a brief instant, he felt a little less transparent.

On rainy days, he walked the streets alone.
People’s faces blurred, and all noise was swallowed by the sound of rain hitting umbrellas.
At times like that, just for a moment—a very brief moment—it felt like he was outside the water.

When the rain struck his face, the cold sensation seeped all the way into his heart.

“Ah… I can still feel something.
My senses aren’t completely gone…”

He tried to hold on to that realization.
But in the end, he returned to the same question.

“In this water, when will I rise to the surface again…?
Or maybe… I’m actually sinking deeper and deeper.”

One afternoon, he went up to the office rooftop.
The sky was neither clear nor cloudy.
The wind was blowing.
An unexplainable feeling brushed past somewhere in his chest.
He murmured softly.

“I… am still here.”

No one heard those words, yet they felt strangely clear—as if they had been spoken outside the water.

Depression, for him, was being underwater.
Time spent sinking quietly, cut off from all emotion and connection.
But very occasionally, even into that water, light would enter.
Faint, but unmistakably stirring the surface.

When that light touched some part of his heart, he proved himself, very quietly.

“I… have not disappeared yet.”