The void lasted an instant and an eternity. It was a blessing of blackness, a total absence of thought, of feeling, of being. The promised freedom. The peace of oblivion. The sweet, silent end of the story.
And the system snatched it away from me.
There was no violent pull this time. No jolt that brought me back to existence. My return was a mockery, an infinitely subtle offense. I opened my eyes, and the world was simply there. Consciousness seeped back into me like water into a sinking ship, bringing with it the weight of everything I was.
I was lying on the floor. The floor of the "Advanced Biology" classroom.
My heart stopped, and then began to beat with a heavy, sickly slowness. I turned my head. The chairs and desks were in place, covered by a fine layer of dust. The plastic skeleton grinned at me from its corner. I looked at the window. It was closed. The latch, firmly secured in place. The oily rain hit the glass, and the wind howled outside, indifferent. As if nothing had happened.
My last act of rebellion. My final declaration of autonomy. My one true attempt to escape, not the level, but the entire game. And the system hadn't even deigned to acknowledge it. It hadn't returned me to the beginning. It hadn't punished me. It had simply pressed "undo." It had edited my suicide as if it were a typo.
I lay motionless, feeling the enormity of my powerlessness. I was not a player in an unfair game. I was a toy in a box. My actions, my decisions, my despair... they meant nothing. I could fight, I could surrender, I could try to break myself against the walls of my cage, and the result was the same. The owner of the box would simply put me back in my place. The hopelessness I had felt before, the one that led me to the window, was an active emotion, a form of pain. This was something much worse. It was nothingness. The void of knowing that not even my own annihilation was in my power.
And then, a sound erupted from my chest.
It started as a gasp, a choked hiccup. Then, a tremor in my shoulders. And it turned into laughter.
It wasn't laughter of joy, or relief. It was the most horrible sound I had ever produced. It was a broken, hysterical laugh, gushing from my empty lungs. I sat up, still on the floor, and laughed until tears rolled down my cheeks, until my stomach ached and my throat felt raw.
I laughed at the cosmic joke. I laughed at myself, the pathetic, dramatic fool who had climbed onto a window ledge believing he could make a decision. A decision! As if my choices had any weight in this pocket universe.
"I tried!" I croaked between laughs, speaking to the dusty air of the classroom. "I really tried! I put my whole heart into it!"
My laughter grew louder, more unhinged.
"And you... you just...!" I gasped, pointing at the ceiling, at the walls, at the invisible system. "Ctrl+Z! Hahaha! Undo! You clicked 'undo' on my death! Oh, that's good! That's brilliant!"
I doubled over, clutching my stomach, shaken by spasms of hilarity that were the purest expression of a broken mind. All the tragedy, all the depression, had curdled into an absurd farce. I was God's court jester, and my best trick was trying to kill myself so He could bring me back with a snap of His fingers.
The laughter finally died down, leaving me empty and trembling on the floor. Silence returned, but it was no longer threatening. It was simply... empty. Like me. I sat there for an immeasurable time, my gaze lost. The gears of my mind, which had stopped in despair, began to turn again, but in a new, strange way. The pieces no longer fit as before.
A new clarity, born of madness, settled over me. If I couldn't escape the pain. If I couldn't choose the end. If my acts of rebellion were useless. Then there was only one path left. A path that was neither defiance nor submission, but total immersion. If the system wanted me to feel, then I would feel. I would feel everything, to the bottom, until the feeling itself lost its meaning. If this place was an ocean, I had tried to swim against the current and I had tried to drown. Now, I would simply stop swimming and sink.
Slowly, I stood up. My movements felt alien, as if I were watching another person control my body. A chilling calm had replaced the hysteria. I walked out of the classroom, gently closing the door behind me, an absurd act of courtesy in the midst of hell.
The hallway greeted me with its usual fury. The wind howled, papers flew. But I no longer felt it as an attack. It was the atmosphere. It was the air here.
I started walking. Not towards a destination. Just walking.
A paper vortex headed straight for me. I didn't flinch. I didn't raise my arms to protect myself. I let it hit me. I felt the thousand small cuts opening on my skin, blood welling up in fine lines. The pain was distant, sensory information rather than a sensation. It didn't matter.
I kept walking. The wind pushed me, but I didn't fight it. I let my body move with its whims, correcting course just enough not to fall. I became another leaf in the storm.
And I opened my mind. I stopped trying to block the memory of the office. I invited it in. I let the voices scream. My mother's, full of a fear disguised as disappointment. My father's, full of an anxiety disguised as anger. Mine, full of an insecurity disguised as rebellion.
I saw them not as people, but as forces. Three separate storms, each with its own low-pressure area, colliding to create a hurricane. With my new and terrifying emotional distance, I could analyze the dynamic with clinical coldness. Every angry word was a shield. Every accusation was a defense.
And it was then, in the heart of that self-imposed cacophony, that I heard something new.
It was beneath the noise. Beneath the howling wind and the screams of memory. It was a whisper. Or many whispers. The words that had gone unsaid. The truths that had drowned in pride and fear.
I stopped in the middle of the hallway, closed my eyes, and focused, not on the storm, but on the silence beneath.
And I heard them. Crystal clear. My mother's voice, not the one that screamed, but the one that silently cried inside her: "I'm afraid of losing you. You're becoming a stranger, and I don't know how to bring you back."
My father's voice, not the one that dictated punishments, but the one that anxiously planned in his head: "The world is harsh and won't forgive the mistakes I made. I just want you to be safe, to have more than I had."
And then, the hardest of all. My own voice. Not the scream of "I hate you!", but the terrified whisper of my seventeen-year-old self that no one, not even I, had wanted to hear.
"I'm scared. I'm scared I'm not enough for you. I'm scared that no matter what I do, I'll always disappoint you. It's easier not to try than to try and fail."
A solitary tear traced a clean path through the dried blood and grime on my cheek.
Understanding hit me with a quiet force. That was the heart of the storm. Not anger. Anger was just the noise, the thunder and the wind. The heart was fear. Everyone's fear. And love, so clumsy and so scared, expressing itself as a weapon instead of an embrace.
I opened my eyes. The storm was subsiding.
The wind no longer howled; it was a soft murmur. The rain no longer crashed against the glass; it was a gentle patter. The paper vortices lost their energy, unraveling in the air until individual sheets glided and fluttered to the floor, forming a carpet of forgiven failures. The lockers stopped slamming.
The silence that remained was not the oppressive silence of the classroom. It was a melancholic stillness. A silence after the battle, when all is said and done, and only the devastated field remains.
I looked down the hallway. It was clean. The papers on the floor were the only evidence that the storm had existed. And at the end, where before there had been a window leading to a violet sky, the wall was now solid, dark rock. And in the center of that wall, carved into the same stone, was a staircase.
My next dose of poison. My reward.
I walked towards it. Each step was heavy, not with the fear from before, but with an exhaustion that seemed to be the age of the universe. There was no sense of victory. No sense of accomplishment. I had survived. I had learned the lesson. The system had deemed me an acceptable student and was allowing me to pass to the next grade.
My failed suicide had not freed me. It had broken me in a way that allowed me to pass the level. The cruelty of that irony was the final joke. Perhaps the system had not punished me or ignored me. Perhaps it had given me exactly what I needed to solve the riddle. It had taken away my hope, and without hope, I could finally see the truth.
I placed my foot on the first step of the new staircase. It was cold. As always. I looked up, into the waiting darkness. I felt nothing. No fear, no anticipation, no despair. Only a resonant emptiness. I was moving forward, not because I wanted to, nor because I hoped to find a way out, but because the staircase was there, and it was the only direction that existed.