The professor wasn't real, the sleepless nights were.
He taught for credits, not cash, while job applications vanished into digital graves. No replies. Still, he filled out DACA forms for neighbours who couldn’t afford lawyers. Never charged. Never would.
By day, he laughed with friends over memes. Traveled. Played games. But inside his chest, something sat cold—not sadness, not emptiness. A numb stone he couldn’t name. He thought about weed. Maybe. Probably not.
Then Emily’s poem made him cry. So he wrote one back, unsure if it fit.
And when an elder said, “Our lineage is a line from north to south,” he felt it pull—Muckleshoot, Inuit, Métis. Ancestors reaching through a broken family line. Beauty and horror tangled like roots.
He scrolled at 12 a.m., typed this confession into the dark, and wondered: Is this what depression feels like?
No one answered. But the stone shifted. Just a little.