Refusal to Shine
The house was quiet but not in the usual way. It seemed abandoned, and some other people in the building would have sworn it was. The man that lived there had hardly showed his face in a few weeks, becoming more of a recluse than he usually was. Some people thought he might be dead, and if the man was going to be completely honest with himself he believed being dead would have been more pleasant than this. Better than sitting at home in the silence with only his paranoid thoughts to comfort him.
Otto knew he was being foolish, but he refused to do anything about it. Such actions went against his nature, and his current nature could be described as melancholy. A gloomy sadness that hung around his home and refused to leave. The most unpleasant of uninvited guests.
He had tried to improve his mood, tried to move on and plaster on one of those all too fake smiles, but Otto soon found that being out in the crowd only bothered him more than he already was. Everyone he saw was smiling, chattering happily about games and twists and star-crossed lovers, and all it did was make him want to retreat back to the emptiness of his home and ignore the world. Perhaps he could even avoid it long enough for the world to forget about him and his stupidity. Forget about him and how much he missed his friend.
And that was just what he'd done. Closed himself away in his room nestled under blankets and unshakeable guilt. There was no evidence one way or the other whether all this had been his fault or not, but guilt very rarely took the time to listen to logic. It poked and prodded with 'what if' and 'what now' and flooded Otto's mind with pleasant memories that churned his stomach and made him want to just shut off.
The days would pass like this. The man only getting up to feed the cat and sometimes himself. In the bathroom he'd avoid the mirrors, not up for eye contact even if it was with himself. Today he hadn't gotten up at all even as hunger scratched at his gut. He couldn't sleep either, eyes half closed and glazed over, adjusted to the darkness of his room. What was the point of doing anything anyway? No one noticed whether he did anything or nothing at all.
Just as much a ghost to society as he had ever been...
