The silence swallows the air in the room, making the clink of a fork on a plate sound like a gunshot. The weight of a body in bed next to you feels a million miles away. You know the look. Not of anger, not of sadness, but of nothing. A terrifying, hollow nothing that looks right through you, as if you are a ghost in your own life. This is the landscape of loving someone with depression. It’s a slow, creeping fog that rolls in and obscures everything you once knew as solid ground. You find yourself editing your own life. You make excuses for them to friends, a constant, low-grade hum of social anxiety. “They’re just tired.” “They’ve been working so hard.” Lies. Not malicious lies, but the desperate, protective kind. The kind that cost you something. You tiptoe. You measure your words, your tone, your very presence, trying not to be the thing that makes it worse. You celebrate a shower, a returned text, a flicker of the person you remember. And in the quiet moments, a secret, shameful thought slithers in: “How long can I do this?” Feel that in your body. Right now. Where does it