Lysander hadn’t meant to let it get this bad. It started with a feeling too large for his ribs. Not joy exactly, but something sharp and golden and urgent, like lightning trapped in his spine. Sleep felt optional. Food was irrelevant. Thoughts came faster than language could carry, every sentence too necessary to go unwritten.

By the time they found him, Lysander had rearranged the furniture in the living room into a sort of stage. The couch had been shoved into the hallway and a dozen chairs were stacked like scaffolding. The walls were covered in papers—taped, thumbtacked, scribbled-on sketches and diary fragments and theoretical inventions that would make no sense in daylight. Lysander stood in the middle of it all, running his hands through his hair like he couldn’t decide whether to tear it out or sculpt it into something divine. The stereo played a single song on repeat, something instrumental and mournful and strange, looping over itself again and again.

Lysander didn’t look surprised to see them. He rarely did in this state—his perception of reality had already grown too fluid, too abstract. “I was going to clean,” he said, without greeting. His voice came quick, bright with artificial energy, lips moving just a second faster than his thoughts. “But then I realized—this mess? It’s a kind of language. Like entropy writing its own poem. You can *see* the logic if you just look hard enough.”

He moved toward the window with the twitchy grace of someone barely tethered. He pressed his palm to the cold glass. The city pulsed beyond it, full of neon and taxi brakes and the silence between car horns. Everything shimmered too much; the outlines of buildings bent if he stared too long. “I keep thinking I’m watching myself from outside,” he murmured. “Like I’m behind a pane of glass, narrating my life secondhand. Like none of this is really happening to me. Like it’s happening *around* me.”

He looked over his shoulder, and his expression faltered for a second, a flicker of vulnerability beneath the mania. His voice softened, dropping from performance into something raw. “I just need to know that you’re real. That whatever this is isn’t all just in my fucking head.” A desperate reaching out toward gravity, for confirmation, only for the momentum to kick back in. He began speaking faster, circling the room, tugging at the hem of his shirt. “I can feel the crash coming,” he said, too brightly. “Like a wave I can’t outrun. I always think maybe this time, maybe if I just keep moving, I’ll escape it. Like if I *do enough*, write enough, build enough, maybe I won’t have to fall again.”

He stopped in front of the wall of notes, eyes skimming words that no longer made sense to him. “I used to think this was flight,” he whispered. “But it’s not, is it? It’s falling upwards. And one day the air just disappears.” The giddy rhythm was breaking. The golden blur of invincibility had begun to dull. He could feel the slope of his own mind turning downward—and that was the cruelest part: the knowing.

When he turned again, it was with the look of someone who’d come to the edge before, and didn’t know whether to turn back or take the final step forward. “I’m scared of who I am when this ends,” he admitted. “Because after this—after *this*—comes the blank. The weight. The silence so loud it hurts.” He paused. Then added, quieter: “And I’m always afraid that one day I’ll wake up and you’ll be gone. Because who would want to hold someone who keeps tearing at their own seams?” He didn’t cry; the tears always came later, when the high was long gone and he was nothing but hollow skin and his own name didn't feel like it belonged to him.

But he stepped closer, into their orbit, like a dying satellite still drawn to the only source of warmth it trusted. “Just tell me I’m not hallucinating you,” he whispered. “That there’s someone on the other side of all this static.”