I’d noticed it waning all through the fall, as my body slowly went back to normal. But on December twenty-second, I looked at the world around me, and it no longer interested me at all. I’d tried my best to make it seem as if everything was the same for so long, even as I ceased to care less and less. But my absence of feeling had intensified to the point now where I couldn’t pretend anymore. Some of that was that I was tired of pretending. The rest was that I no longer had anything left to pretend with. I couldn’t seem to reach my emotions. I didn’t care about watching the latest episodes of the series I followed, or even trying to follow them, so I stopped recording them, deleting the saved episodes I’d stopped watching weeks before. At first, I’d been the loving wife that Theo expected, welcoming his advances like always, even though my heart wasn’t in it. Before long, Theo had felt in my kisses that I didn’t mean them, and stopped trying to initiate anything. I had once laughed at jokes Terian told and gossiped with Cia, but now I avoided them both, and my family, too.
