The first step to fixing your life is admitting it's a disaster.
The second step is setting that disaster on fire.
I couldn't start an actual fire—though believe me, the thought crossed my mind more than once—but I could do the next best thing:
Clean.
I stood in the middle of the room and took a good, long look around.
Piles of paper. Crumpled clothes. Empty plates. Half-melted candles. And in the center of it all: a giant corkboard covered in pictures, names, and what I could only describe as a love conspiracy.
Strings connected events that didn't matter. Dates circled in red ink. Drawings of Aris Valentine from every possible angle. Notes about how she wore her hair. What flowers she liked. Her favorite pastry.
There were even notes about the people around her—competitors, probably. Rivals for her affection. Not that she knew, of course.
It was worse than I remembered.
"Caleb," I said to the room, "you were one bad day away from becoming a documentary."
First thing I did was rip the entire board down.
The sound of pins hitting the floor was way too satisfying.
I tore the papers, crumpled the sketches, dumped the fake-poetic love letters into the fireplace. I even found a bottle of cologne labeled "Enchanted Evening" and threw it straight into the bin. If I ever smelled like that again, I wanted someone to slap me.
Next came the room itself.
I opened the curtains for the first time in who knows how long. Light poured in like it was trying to bless the space. Dust danced in the air. I sneezed three times.
I stripped the bed, dumped the old sheets into the hallway, and hunted down fresh ones from a nearby closet. My body still moved weird—like it hadn't been used right in years—but I was getting used to it.
Then I found it.
Tucked under a pile of clothes: a sketchbook.
This one wasn't filled with hearts and flowers. No poems. No Aris.
Just... art.
Real art.
Charcoal drawings, some unfinished. Quick studies of street scenes. A quiet sketch of a woman sitting in a garden, face turned away. A crumpled piece with a man standing alone under a tree, half-erased but powerful.
And they were good.
Like, really good.
I flipped through page after page, my hands moving slower, my heart oddly still. There was depth here. Sadness. Skill.
Was this Caleb's?
Or mine now?
For the first time since waking up in this cursed body, I felt... something real.
Maybe he wasn't completely useless. Maybe, somewhere under the creepy behavior and the obsessive nonsense, there was a part of him that just didn't know how to express himself.
Still pathetic. But maybe not hopeless.
I found a blank page, picked up a piece of charcoal, and started drawing.
Nothing fancy. Just a hand. My hand—well, his hand. Holding the charcoal. Shaky lines, stiff posture. But it started coming back to me.
Not my old job. Not the spreadsheets or the emails or the long nights.
Just this.
This was the first thing that felt right.
I stayed like that for hours, sketching in silence, the mess around me slowly becoming a room again.
And when I was done, I sat back, looked at my work, and muttered:
"Well... maybe I can work with this."