THREE YEARS AGO

The camera flipped on. The cute lizard avatar froze mid-motion, replaced by his real face—pale, wide-eyed, exposed. For a split second, time seemed to stop, then rushed back in with a vengeance. The chat erupted, words blurring together in a cascade of “gross” and “fat,” interspersed with a flood of disappointed emojis and harsh expletives. The bile rose in his throat. His hands hovered uselessly over the keyboard, trembling. The familiar chat box transformed into a weaponized swarm of disdain. His vision blurred, the lines of text running together, and every harsh emoji seemed to sear itself into his mind. Not this. Not now.

The light from the monitor seared his eyes, turning the room’s familiar comfort into something harsh and unrecognizable. His scalp prickled with cold, stinging heat.

“Son, what are you doing? Why do you look like that?” Her voice, sharp and unyielding, pierced through his spiraling panic, yanking him back to harsh reality. “Are you feeling sick? You look awful. Do you need your medicine?” She moved closer, her breath uncomfortably close to his ear as she leaned in, eyes narrowing at the screen. Her shadow swallowed the soft glow of the monitor, casting Cayden in darkness. His throat tightened painfully. She always showed up at the worst moments, invading without permission, smothering without care. But this—this was beyond anything he could bear.

“This is why I said you shouldn’t do this streaming thing.” Her tone dripped with irritation, each word a slow, deliberate jab. “You waste so much time on this nonsense.” Without waiting for a reply, she reached out, her fingers brushing over his carefully arranged notes and props. She moved a cup, then a pen, her touch a casual dismissal of his efforts. “I just don’t get it,” she muttered, the clinking objects punctuating each phrase like a judge’s gavel, sentencing his passion to irrelevance. The noise grated against him, each sound sinking deeper into his skin.

Cayden’s skin crawled. She always needed to control the narrative, to make him feel small and foolish—especially now, when he needed her to just stop. To leave him alone.

Cayden remained frozen, his body unresponsive as the torrent of comments continued to pour in. Each line of text felt like another stone added to the crushing weight on his chest. The cruel words shifted focus—now they attacked his age, mocked his mother’s intrusion, mocking her presence, mocking his helplessness. Each word stripped away the thin shield he had left.

His vision blurred, but he couldn’t tear himself away. He wanted to scream, to fight back, to do anything but sit there. But his hands refused to move.

“What’s wrong now?” His mother snapped. “You look terrible, look what streaming does to you!”  She had come in mid-stream and started arranging things on his desk while Cayden streamed. The camera controls on the streaming deck were easy to reach. Somehow, she deactivated his avatar and turned on his camera.

He reached for the mouse with leaden fingers, the small motion feeling like a monumental effort. His mind echoed with every jeer, every hateful word, until it was all he could hear. The cursor hovered over the end stream button. He couldn’t muster the strength to speak, to defend himself. He clicked once, and silence fell—but it was the kind that pressed in from all sides, deafening in its emptiness.

He ended the stream with a trembling hand, the click of the mouse like a final nail in the coffin. But it wasn’t over. The flood of notifications came in an unrelenting wave—unfollows, unsubscribes, messages dripping with contempt. “You scarred me,” one said. “Never again,” another sneered. Abuse. Mockery. Words became knives, and each cut was deeper than the last. 

He wanted to shut it all out, but the weight of it pressed down, suffocating him, until he could barely breathe. He never wanted to show himself—not then, not now, and maybe not ever again.