The harsh, pale morning light filtered through the cracked blinds of an off-campus apartment, feeling like physical daggers against Leo’s exhausted eyes.
He sat on the edge of a bare, unmade mattress, his elbows resting on his knees and his head heavy in his hands.
A cold, clammy sweat clung to his neck.
His hands were trembling, completely out of his control.
Sitting on the cheap particle-board nightstand next to him was a small, translucent orange prescription bottle.
It had started innocently enough—a shoulder injury from intramural basketball six months ago.
But the prescription had long since run out, and Leo had spent the last three months buying pressed pills off a guy who lived three dorms down.
Now, it was the only thing keeping him from completely falling apart.
He hated himself for it.
He hated the lying, the money he was draining from his savings, and the fake, hollow smile he plastered on his face every time he walked onto campus.
The cycle was suffocating him, a silent, invisible weight that was slowly pulling him completely under the water.
Desperate for any distraction to stop his brain from screaming at him to open the bottle, Leo grabbed his phone.
He unlocked the screen and mindlessly opened Twitter.
His thumb swiped down, refreshing the timeline.
Right at the top of his feed was a retweet from a massive account.
Chance the Rapper had posted a SoundCloud link with a heavy caption:
Chicago, we got a new voice.
This kid is incredibly special.
Leo blinked, his heavy, bloodshot eyes staring at the screen.
He needed something to drown out the silence of the room.
He tapped the link and brought his phone to his ear, leaning back against the cold drywall.
He expected a heavy, aggressive drill beat to blow his eardrums out.
That was the standard for Chicago.
Instead, a gentle, beautifully melancholic acoustic guitar loop filled his ear.
The strings sounded raw and intimate, like someone was sitting in the corner of his messy room playing just for him.
The heavy trap bass dropped, giving the track a hypnotic, bobbing rhythm.
Then, a raspy, agonizing voice cut through the beat.
“I can’t breathe, I’m waiting for the exhale… Toss my pain with my wishes in a wishing well…”
Leo stopped breathing.
The air left his lungs in a sharp rush.
“Let’s be for real, if it wasn’t for the pills, I wouldn’t be here But if I keep taking these pills, I won’t be here, yeah I just told y’all my secret, yeah It’s tearing me to pieces…”
A violent shiver ran down Leo’s spine.
The trembling in his hands stopped, replaced by a sudden, overwhelming paralysis.
It felt like the voice coming through the phone was reaching directly into his chest, grabbing his darkest, most closely guarded secret, and putting it on display.
As the artist—someone named Juice WRLD—sang about the crushing stress on his shoulders and the desperate cycle of self-medication, the walls Leo had spent months building finally shattered.
He wasn’t just listening to a song.
He was listening to a mirror.
A single, hot tear slipped out of the corner of Leo’s eye, cutting a warm path down his cold cheek.
Then came another. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Within seconds, his chest was heaving.
He buried his face in his hands and broke down, the heavy, agonizing sobs echoing in the empty apartment.
For the first time in six months, he didn’t feel completely alone.
He didn’t feel like a monster.
Someone else understood the exact, terrifying paradox of needing a chemical to survive while knowing it was the very thing killing him.
The song faded out, leaving a ringing silence in the room.
Leo slowly wiped his face with the sleeve of his hoodie.
His chest still ached, but the suffocating pressure in his mind had cracked open, letting in a single, desperate sliver of hope.
He looked at the orange pill bottle on the nightstand.
The urge to open it was still there—a dark, snarling beast in the back of his mind.
But the song had given him a momentary shield.
Leo reached out, grabbed the plastic bottle, and walked into his tiny, cramped bathroom.
He unscrewed the cap, tipped the bottle over the toilet, and watched the small white pills tumble into the water.
He reached up and aggressively slammed the flush handle, watching the water swirl down the drain, carrying his demons with it.
He walked back out to his bed, picked up his phone, and hit replay on the SoundCloud link.
Miles away, Jarad sat in his bedroom staring at a screen, completely unaware that his rising play counter wasn’t just a metric of fame.
With every click, Wishing Well was saving lives.