Home didn’t feel like home anymore. His brain felt like it was swimming, boiling, frying. As he threw open the front door, he didn’t even care to carry his bag anymore, leaving it on the floor.

Evan only had one more thing to check. Cross that, two more things. The time and his plants. Yes. His parents weren’t here in this reality. There was no point in looking for them. They would never come home, and he knew it.

He looked to the grandfather clock. It was 3:02 P.M…. He had made it home three minutes too early. Bad luck, again. Evan limped to his room.

He slammed his bedroom door open. Oh no.  He ran, frantically, to his windowsill.

His cacti looked dried up, dusty –a sad hollow shell of the lively being from before.

The flower didn’t fare much better. Petals, curled up and gray, lay like corpses around dried sticks that used to be the stem, the body that used to be flowers that kept him company.

His mind must be wilting, going insane. He had lost his grip somewhere, and let go of himself the same way one accidentally leaves behind their groceries in the car to rot. He backed away, falling onto his bed. He’s lost, lost somewhere, lost –

But then again, Reality always seemed subjective. A piece of a bigger picture. He was just a piece, a small piece of a puzzle that he couldn’t solve, a piece that didn’t fit no matter which way you turned it or tried to fit it in –

And then, he let his plants wilt, die, and he let something break. He hasn’t been timing his obsessions anymore, has he? He hasn’t been following his lists, his schedules, his timers, has he?

He tried to close his eyes. But no matter how tight he squeezed them shut, he kept hearing the empty noise playing in his brain. If he could hop out of his body, if his soul could just escape the cycles of thoughts that bothered him all day, it would be alright. He could live his life, be a successful businessman or artist or writer or scientist or whatever it is normal people grow up to be. He could stop obsessing over the little details, over tiny intricacies that others overlooked, because in the end, none of the small things mattered. It was always the bigger picture he had failed to see.

He tried slapping his wrist to cut off the stream of thoughts. But it was too late. They rushed over him, like a river breaking a dam, and rushed faster and faster around him until his brain felt as if it was drowning in the blood inside his head.

One, two, three –

Tap, tap, tap –

Help, help, help –

He screamed, rising and snatching the two vases of the dead plants and threw them both through his window. It shattered, and the vases shrunk into dots as they flew far down the street. Glass fell before him, scattering like hard petals before his feet. He felt the panic flow away, and his blood surged in his arms enough to make his hands tremble.

Evan had done this to himself. All this thinking, all this trouble, all his forgetfulness, he has created. This world wasn’t real anymore to him, and all around him lay fragments of a false world that he created and chose to be prisoner in.