‘No! No! No!’ I shot up from my couch. They had taken a photo and posted it to social media. Quickly, I opened my account; my numbers had fallen further.

‘No!’ I screamed into my empty apartment. ‘How dare they!’ My heart was pounding. I knew this feeling; it was panic and anger—the same feelings that Gaurav and Puneet had stirred up with their infidelity.

I paced about as the room began to spin. My apartment was littered with remnants of how I had been neglecting myself, but I forced myself to look beyond it. ‘Not now,’ I told myself as my stomach protested. Blackness crept in from my peripheral vision. It was so subtle that I didn’t have the time to react to what was happening. My body betrayed me, my eyes no longer seeing. The last thing I remember was cursing, wondering if I would wake up this time and, if I didn’t, how long it would take for someone to find me.

The scientific term is hypnagogic: the state between being awake and asleep. When the conscious mind fights the brain to return to the land of the living, somewhere between hallucination and paralysis as the body begins to function once more. For me, it felt never-ending. A blow by blow of everything I had done wrong in life, everything that made me imperfect.

‘Wake up. What did you take?’

How fitting that the girl who grew up surrounded by so many people should leave this world in the same way.

‘I don’t know. I just got here, and she was like this.’

I fought so hard to leave home. To avoid marriage and to not become another statistic, and now, that is what my life was. I was a statistic, a girl behind a screen, and I couldn’t escape it. Didn’t know how to be anyone other than the person I taught myself to be.

‘It’s beating, but it’s fast. Too fast! Hurry, please!’

Would they miss me? The countless faces who couldn’t wait to pull back the curtain several times a day to look into my life. Voyeurs; that was what humanity had become. A sick, twisted game of watching while others strived for perfection and berating ourselves for never reaching those levels. I was one of them. Peeping into other’s lives, pushing myself to be everything that I saw at their show.

‘Can you move aside? We need to work on her.’

And what of those few who actually knew me. What would they say about what I have become? A mess on the floor amongst all the things society threw at me to sell. An object, to be sold with other objects.

‘We’re taking her into Lifeline. Are you going to ride along?’