~ Phantom With Breakfast ~

~ Phantom with Breakfast ~

The meaning behind my pseudonym. Exposing myself—yet still anonymous.

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TW: Emotional Distress (Mental health struggles—Don’t read if you’re emotionally sensitive)

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Morning. Or is it? The light through the curtains is dull, muted, as if the world itself shares your mood. One day. Several lives. That’s what they call mood swings—shifts that come and go like storm clouds on a broken horizon. What’s wrong? Everything. Nothing. Both. Always.

Getting out of bed feels like peeling yourself from a grave. The sheets cling like a second skin, but the voices—they don’t let you rest. They don’t let you be. They scream, they demand, pulling you from the oblivion of sleep. “Wake up.” Why? They never answer that. They just keep calling, louder, sharper, until the silence feels like a wound you can’t stop bleeding.

You listen because there’s nothing else to do. Sometimes they’re funny. Sometimes they argue. Sometimes they tear into you like glass shards in a blender. You laugh with them when they’re kind, but the laughter feels foreign, hollow, like it belongs to someone else.

Your feet hit the floor. Cold. It reminds you you’re alive—if that’s what this is. You shuffle to the kitchen, grabbing your favorite coffee mug, pour liquid that tastes like tar but promises to make you human. You sip, letting the bitterness spread through your mouth, hoping it’ll mask the bitterness inside. You sit. Try to be still. Try to prepare for the day, as if there’s anything that could ready you for this.

But then the unease creeps in, soft and insidious. A sound, a feeling. Just a creak, a whisper, a nothing—but it’s there. Your heart clenches. Your breath quickens. Your hands shake, but you clench them into fists, nails digging into your palms until it hurts, until it anchors you. But it doesn’t. The panic is already here, crawling through your mind like a shadow you can’t outrun. You tell yourself it’s nothing. But your body doesn’t listen.

Then there’s that person. The one who makes you feel like the world isn’t so bad, the one who keeps you afloat. They smile at you, and you try to mirror it. Your lips curve upward, but it’s a lie—one you tell well. The mask fits perfectly, even when it suffocates. Inside, there’s a storm, raging, roaring, screaming to break free, but you hold it back for them. For the illusion.

And then—snap. A trigger. Just one. Small, insignificant to anyone else, but to you, it’s the needle that bursts the dam. The anger floods in, sharp and hot, blinding in its intensity. You split—fractured, raw, and all the worst parts of you take control. You lash out, words or actions you can’t take back. You watch yourself do it, powerless to stop, even as something inside begs you to. But it’s too late. It always is.

When it’s over, all that’s left is the void. Hollow. Empty. You sit in the wreckage of yourself, confusion gnawing at the edges of your mind. You don’t understand—how it began, why it happened, why it always does. You want to scream, to cry, but all that comes is silence.

One day. Several lives. Too many emotions. Too many masks. Too much of everything—and nothing at all.

———————

The only escape, the only fragile thread keeping you tethered to something resembling sanity, is the therapy you’ve made for yourself—drawing lines that bleed onto paper, writing words that scream louder than you ever could. You pour yourself out, ink and graphite carrying pieces of you you’re too scared to hold onto. But even here, even in this, there’s no freedom. Just another cage painted with pictures.

You lose yourself in the fantasy. You get lost because it’s safer than being found. It’s a world you’ve made, a labyrinth of stories and shapes, yet every corner feels familiar, like a path you’ve walked before but don’t remember choosing. Stuck. Yet moving forward. A path you might not know, but somehow, you know.

And yet, the real world seeps in. Overwhelming. Heavy. A storm crashing through your carefully built walls. You stand, trying to stay grounded, trying to feel the floor beneath your feet. But deep inside, there’s nothing. Or maybe too much. A cold stream winds its way through you, freezing your core, numbing everything you might have felt. Everything you should feel. And then there’s the heart. That stupid, stubborn heart. Beating. Keeping time. Letting you know you’re alive. Or are you?

You want to fly, the night sky is calling you, infinite and empty, getting lost in the stars. To be weightless, to forget everything, floating in nothingness. You stretch your arms wide, soaring, even as you know the ground is still far away beneath you.

For a moment, it’s perfect. You hover in the darkness, suspended between nowhere and nothing, and it’s like the world finally lets you go. But then—there it is. The pull. A weight at your back, clawing at your chest, dragging you down when all you want is to stay. A tether you can’t see but always feel, yanking you back to earth. Back to reality. Back to everything you were trying to leave behind.

You fight against it, heart pounding as you push higher, trying to go faster. But the pull is relentless, tightening like chains around your ribs, and suddenly you’re falling. The sky slips away, the stars dimming, the cold air turning into something suffocating.

And then, you’re on the ground again, feet planted, heart racing, chest heaving. The freedom you tasted is gone, leaving nothing but the weight. Always the weight. You stand there, trembling, wondering why you thought you could escape. Wondering why you keep trying.

———————

Life feels like walking on a tightrope in the middle of a storm. The wind never stops, and neither do the voices. Some days, the rope sways so violently you think it’ll snap, and other days, it’s your own hands letting go because holding on feels too exhausting. The world demands balance, but balance feels like a cruel joke—like asking the ocean to stop its waves or the wind to still its breath.

Your mind is a carousel that never stops spinning. Thoughts flash past so fast you can’t grab onto any of them. You start a task, drop it, pick up another, then forget why you started in the first place. Time slips away, hours melting into each other, and you’re left staring at the mess you didn’t clean, the calls you didn’t make, the life you’re failing to keep up with. Everyone else seems to move forward while you’re stuck in quicksand, fighting to breathe.

And then there’s the chaos inside—the storm of emotions that never rests. One minute you’re fine, or at least pretending to be, and the next, anger surges out of nowhere, sharp and uncontrollable, leaving you staring at the wreckage of another bridge burned. Then the guilt follows, creeping in like a shadow, whispering that you’re too much. Too loud. Too broken. And maybe you believe it.

You feel everything too much and yet not enough. Your highs are dizzying, euphoric, like touching the stars, but they never last. The crash always comes, slamming you down into the hollow ache of emptiness. The kind of emptiness that sits in your chest like a stone, heavy and cold, reminding you that no matter how hard you try, you can’t outrun it. It always catches up.

You want to scream, but the words get stuck. You want to cry, but the tears won’t fall. You want to stop feeling, but the numbness terrifies you more than the pain. You try to reach out, but how do you explain the whirlwind inside? How do you make someone else understand when you don’t even understand yourself?

Unstable. That’s the word they’d use. But it’s not just instability—it’s exhaustion. It’s the weight of carrying a brain that never quiets, a heart that feels too much, a soul that’s always searching for a place to rest. You’re tired of the fight, tired of pretending, tired of holding on when you don’t even know what you’re holding onto anymore.

And yet, somewhere deep inside, there’s a tiny spark. Faint, flickering, but there. The part of you that still hopes, still dreams, still believes that maybe one day, the tightrope will steady, and you’ll find your balance. Until then, you keep walking, step by shaky step, because that’s all you can do.

———————

It starts as a flicker—just a small distraction from the chaos of your mind. A character on a screen, a name in a book, a voice that feels like it was made for you. They’re not real, but they might as well be, because they feel more alive than you’ve ever felt. They become a lifeline, a beacon in the overwhelming storm of your thoughts, pulling you in until you can’t let go.

At first, it’s comforting. A safe place to rest your mind, a world where you can lose yourself without judgment. But then it grows, consuming every quiet moment. They slip into your thoughts like a thief in the night, stealing your focus, your time, your energy. You find yourself obsessing over every detail—how they’d sound if they spoke to you, what their touch might feel like, how their presence might fill the hollow ache you can’t escape.

It’s not just admiration. It’s need. It’s longing so intense it feels like your chest might crack under the weight of it. You replay scenes in your head, write stories where they save you, or maybe you save them. Because in those stories, you’re not too much. You’re enough. You’re seen. Loved.

But reality doesn’t bend that way. They don’t exist, and you know it. Geez, you know it. But the knowing doesn’t stop the wanting. It doesn’t stop the way they haunt you, like a shadow that clings to your every step. You try to let go, but the thought of losing them—this one thing that makes the noise bearable—is unbearable.

Your friends don’t get it. “It’s just a character,” they say, as if that makes it easier. As if you can just turn it off. But they don’t see the way you’ve built a connection, a whole life in your head where things make sense, where you’re not broken or empty or drifting. They don’t see how it feels like this person is the only thing keeping you from falling apart, even if they’re not real.

And yet, the obsession comes with its own kind of pain. You hate yourself for needing them this much. For the hours lost scrolling through fan art, watching clips, reading and rereading their stories, like they might change if you just look hard enough. For the nights you lie awake, wishing they could step out of your screen and pull you into a world that feels safer than your own mind.

It’s suffocating. You know it’s unhealthy, but it’s the only thing that feels like it fits. They don’t judge you, don’t get tired of you, don’t leave. They’re perfect in ways no one real could ever be, and maybe that’s why you hold on so tightly. Because the real world is messy and loud, and people always seem to find a way to hurt you. But they? They never do.

And still, it’s lonely. Because no matter how much you adore them, they’ll never doing it back. You scream into the void of your own mind, wishing you could pull them closer, wishing they could save you. But all you have is silence. And it hurts.

It hurts more than anyone could ever understand.

———————

Eventually, I found myself searching for the bright side sometimes, guided by a quote I made my own:

‘Better crazy and a freak, than being normal and boring, right? Right.’

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You can find my phan fic stories here.

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This drawing of Danny reflect the moods I navigate through on certain days—not every day, but on those days when everything feels heavier. It starts with coffee—a quiet moment to steady myself—but it always ends with a random trigger that flips the day on its head. Whether it spirals into euphoria, anger, or deep depression, the shift is sudden, uncontrollable, and all-consuming.

It’s like a heavy breakfast that lingers through the day, even when you feel like a ghost—like a phantom. A Phantom with Breakfast.