Tony S.

The darkness didn’t arrive all at once. It seeped. It moved the way water does when it finds a crack—quiet, patient, impossible to notice until the floorboards have already started to soften. The days after that night blurred together into something dull and colorless. Not tragic enough to alarm anyone. Not dramatic enough to demand intervention. Just… thinning. Each morning felt a little more drained than the one before it, like whatever part of me generated momentum was leaking

Saturday morning arrived in sensible clothes, the kind that didn’t demand anything dramatic of the world. Light pooled in clean strips across the floor when I opened the door to Marvin’s knock, three soft taps that sounded like courtesy instead of urgency. “You can say no,” he said, already holding up a thermos like neutrality could be weaponized into kindness. A small plastic container rode shotgun in his other hand. “Oats. Scientists insist.” Color crept up the edges of his ears when

That’s the thing with people who have depression or PTSD—admitting they need help and staying consistent with treatment are the most difficult parts. Kent is lucky to have Marvin by his side, but when the depression spirals, it can make him unable to see who’s there for him at all.

The condo had that after-hospital brightness even with the lights off—surfaces too clean, air too careful. The discharge papers sat on the dresser beside the boardwalk photo from 2016, me and my brother shoulder to shoulder, same stupid haircut, his grin already picking a fight with the lens. A knock, gentle, twice. The framed bleachers photo usually stands guard on the nightstand, two of us grinning back at the room; at the sound of Marvin’s knock I reached for it and tipped it gently

The dream came on like a siren that didn’t know how to stop. Heat that dissolves the horizon. Radios spitting consonants into the heat. The stink of cordite and camel grass. My squad strung out across a courtyard that wanted to be safe and refused. Reyes left, Miller right, Doc too far from both. I’m yelling cover left but the word breaks its ankle on the step down. A door blows and the doorframe becomes a mouth—red tracers like teeth. Vic-2 coughs and dies. Someone’s throat is a straw with

The nightmare didn’t wear Ken’s face. That was what unsettled me most when I woke. It left me in a street I hadn’t walked in years, heat clinging to the walls, dust and rot hanging in the air while radios cracked with voices that didn’t belong to anyone I could see. Someone shouted coordinates that came too late. Boots slipped. A body went down somewhere beyond a corner I couldn’t clear fast enough, and the certainty settled into me that stopping meant dying. I woke with my hands

The nightmare came quietly, without sirens or shouting, shaped instead like a stairwell that smelled faintly of bleach and wet concrete, the fluorescent lights flickering overhead like they couldn’t decide whether to stay on. My boots didn’t echo when I moved, which was what made me stop halfway down and look back. Ken stood at the landing above me with his hands in the pockets of a jacket I hadn’t seen since high school, the Rutgers hoodie zipped halfway like he had just stepped out for coffee

Morning came the way it always does when you haven’t really slept—too bright, too certain, like it expects you to participate. I woke to traffic and river-light leaking around the curtains, my phone still in my hand from wherever I’d dropped it during the night. For a second I didn’t know where I was. For a second I was eighteen again and the ceiling fan meant summer and Ken was down the hall making toast too loud. Then the condo asserted itself. Glass. Silence. Air-conditioning with o

Nope, different Marvin. Glad you asked! I may wanna put some stories in the same universe in the future but as of now this one is a standalone.

One morning I saw him again. He was coming back from a run, shirt damp at the collar, headphones resting around his neck. I was fiddling with the mailbox I still didn’t know how to open. “Hi. You’re not Thai, are you?” he asked. His voice had that careful city-English cadence that doesn’t trip over itself. “You’re new—across from me.” “Yeah,” I said. I held up the keycard like a confession. He smiled with his mouth first, then his eyes. “Welcome to the building.” “Thanks.”

I don't have PTSD but I do battle my depression and I want this story depicts that as best as possible.

Jet lag isn’t a clock; it’s a tide. It pulled me under and threw me back onto a schedule my body didn’t approve of. I woke before dawn with my heart already sprinting, the residue of dream still stuck to my ribs—gunfire with no muzzle flash, a radio full of ghosts, a voice that kept turning into Ken’s. The room was too new to hold it. I sat on the edge of the bed and let the air-con breathe for both of us, palms pressed together until the tremor chose a shape I could manage. By late mornin

Haha yeah Kent's father is American Japanese and mother is Thai Chinese. The setting this time will be in Bangkok! Stay tuned!

After losing his twin brother in a violent tragedy, a former U.S. Marine returns to his roots in Bangkok, hoping distance might quiet the past that refuses to let go. Haunted by memory, guilt, and a love he was never allowed to name, Kent struggles to rebuild a life that no longer fits the person he used to be. Across the hall lives Marvin—steady, observant, and patient in ways Kent doesn’t yet trust. What begins as proximity slowly becomes choice, forcing Kent to confront a different kind of fear: not losing the past, but moving forward without it.

The gunfire always starts in silence. That’s the worst part—the nothing before the noise, the inhale that never ends. Then the alley folds inward, the dark burns white, and somebody screams my name in a voice that keeps changing—first the platoon sergeant, then a kid I carried to the bird once, then Ken, always Ken—and I’m running and not moving at all. My boots slide on blood I can’t find; the radio hisses like a snake I can’t grab. I shoulder a door that becomes a body that becomes my brother,