My fingers dig into my palms as I remind myself to do the one thing that should come naturally to anyone alive. But right now, my lungs feel like they're filled with cement, each breath a battle I'm losing.

Human?

My reflection in the window stares back, hollow-eyed and foreign.

Sure.

Functioning?

A bitter laugh threatens to escape.

Barely.

Who am I kidding? I'm a disaster. The panic attack I've been suppressing all morning claws at my chest, like a wild animal trying to break free. The room I've been stuck in for the last two and a half hours shrinks with each passing minute, the walls inching closer like a slowly tightening fist.

Condolences float around me like static, blending with the endless clinking of teacups. Each clink sends shards of sound through my skull, splintering what's left of my composure. The sound will haunt my dreams, I'm sure of it – the musical notes of mourning, the symphony of loss.

I need to get out of here.

Time has warped since the funeral this morning. Somehow, two hours feel like two lifetimes, while last week – the last time I heard Dad's laugh – passed in the blink of an eye. The only reason I know what day it is?

It's the day before my sixteenth birthday.

And now, it's also the day I said goodbye to dad forever.

Hugs come at me like waves, each one threatening to pull me under. The scent of perfume, aftershave, and sympathy surrounds me, a suffocating cloud of forced affection. The walls creep closer, the air growing thinner with each "I'm so sorry for your loss."

After two days of pretending I'm okay, I feel like a helium balloon cut loose from its string, floating away into nothingness.

Detached. Untethered. Lost.

Is this how every moment will feel now?

Trapped and numb?

My face aches from wearing this mask of composure, from murmuring polite thanks to people whose names blur together in my grief-addled mind.

It's not fine. Nothing about this is fine.

I'm in purgatory.

The living room of our small Boston home has become a sea of mourners, black-clad figures packed shoulder-to-shoulder like a murder of crows. Dad would've cracked a joke about it – something about penguins at a funeral. I can almost hear his laugh, the way his eyes would crinkle at the corners. The ghost of that sound makes my chest ache.

People get weird at funerals, hovering between awkward sympathy and desperate attempts at comfort. I just wish they'd say less. A simple nod would be better than the endless echoes of empty words reminding me he's gone.

Half the people here, I don't even know.

And I don't care to.