Ari Ven jolted awake. Her heart slammed against her ribs as if trying to claw its way out. The ghost of the voice clung to her ears, fading too fast, slipping from her grasp like water through trembling fingers.

She dragged in a shaky breath, wiping the cold sweat beading on her neck. The room was silent, too silent, and the emptiness where the voice had been felt like a sudden drop in temperature.

Ari Ven sat up. Needing air, needing something solid to anchor herself, she moved toward the window and sank onto the wooden chair beside it, her gaze drifting to the endless stretch of gray sky outside. Not the soft gray of a quiet morning. Not the gentle gray of rain.

But the heavy kind. The kind that felt like a weight pressing down on her chest, making it harder to breathe. Just like the voices in her head. Just like the dream she had woken from, beautiful for a moment, unbearable when gone.

“Do something useful, Ari.”

Her mother’s voice slammed into the quiet, as if she were standing there beside her. The words from earlier that morning dug in deep, reopening a wound she never had the chance to let heal.

“How much longer do you expect us to take care of you?”

The echoes settled over her like another layer of gray, another weight she didn’t ask for, one she carried alone, even in her dreams.

The remnants of a half-empty coffee cup sat on the small table beside her; cold now, just like her thoughts.

She ran a hand over her tired face. It had been three years since she’d left college, three years since her father died, and yet the pressure never stopped.

Her mother, her elder sisters, even her elder brother... everyone had an opinion about what she should be doing with her life. But none of them seemed to understand the suffocating weight of it all.

She had dropped out of college after her father’s death in 2019. She couldn’t keep up with the tuition fees, and the pressure from her family to help support them was too much.

They had never asked her if she was okay, if she could handle it. They just expected her to keep pushing forward, to be the one who held everything together. And when she couldn’t, when the weight of it all was too much, they called her weak. Useless.

“Ari, get a job,” her second oldest sister, Kim, had said over the phone just last week.

“We can’t keep supporting you forever. It’s time you grew up.”

Kim’s voice had been sharp, like always. Ari tried to explain that she was writing, that she was working on something, but it wasn’t enough for Kim.

Nothing ever seemed to be. Ari could already hear the judgment in her elder sister voice, could already see the disappointment in her eyes, even though she couldn’t look her in the face anymore.

There were days when Ari wondered what it would feel like if she just... left.

If she packed a bag, walked out the door, and never came back.

Would anyone even notice? Or would they just keep going, absorbed in their own little worlds, their own struggles, until they eventually forgot about her?

Her younger sister, Tessa, was the only one who seemed to understand.

Tessa was still in college, pursuing a degree in architecture, but Ari knew her younger sister carried her own burdens. She always had that look on her face; tired, but determined.

At least Tessa was still trying to move forward, even if she was just as lost as Ari.

The rest of the family was a different story. Kim had a family of her own now, a husband and five children.

Ari loved her nieces and nephews, but there were days when she wished Kim would stop using them as a reason to justify her own failures. Every conversation seemed to be about the bills, the mortgage, the endless pressure to make ends meet.

And when Kim wasn’t talking about her kids, she was talking about Ari... about how she needed to do something with her life, how she needed to stop relying on them.

And then there was Ryan, her older brother. He was the worst of all. He hadn’t had a stable job in years, and whenever Ari tried to talk to him, all he did was argue.

They fought over the smallest things, and it made her blood boil. He was lazy, immature, and he never saw how much weight Ari was carrying. It was always her fault in his eyes. Always her problem to fix.

Ari stood up abruptly, needing to move, needing to escape her thoughts. The walls of the small apartment felt like they were closing in on her again.

The pressure of her family’s expectations, the weight of their demands, pressed on her shoulders like a boulder she couldn’t move.

She hadn’t written anything in weeks. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, but the words wouldn’t come.

Every time she tried, her mind wandered back to the things she couldn’t control; the bills piling up, her mother’s declining health, the endless chain of responsibilities that she could never escape.

Ari grabbed her coat and slipped it on. Maybe a walk would help.

Maybe, just maybe, she could clear her head and forget about the crushing weight of her responsibilities for a while.

The cool air hit her as soon as she stepped outside. The streets were bustling with life, but to Ari, it felt like a world she couldn’t belong to.

The sounds of traffic, the chatter of strangers; they all seemed distant, like they were happening in a different reality.

She kept walking, her footsteps slow, her mind racing.

What was she supposed to do?

She had dreams. She wanted to write. But her being a writer didn’t pay the bills.

Writing didn’t feed her mother’s ever-growing list of medications. Writing didn’t keep the lights on when her family forgot to pay the electricity bill.

But if she wasn’t writing, who was she?

She crossed the street without really thinking, her eyes lost in the haze of her own mind. And then, a car screeched to a halt right in front of her.

Ari jumped back, heart hammering in her chest. The driver shouted something, but Ari couldn’t make out the words. She was too shaken, too numb to react.

“Are you okay?” the driver called out.

Ari nodded quickly, not trusting herself to speak. She didn’t trust herself to be anything but broken.

She didn’t feel like she belonged anywhere; not in her family, not in this world.

As she walked back home, the weight in her chest felt heavier than ever. It wasn’t just the weight of her family’s expectations or the pressure to find a “real” job. It was the weight of knowing she had no answers... that she didn’t know how to fix any of it. She didn’t know who she was anymore. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep pretending to be all right.