Dism -

“I think I understand,” she said.

He considered this. Stirred his coffee. “No,” he said finally. “Depression is a clinical thing. It’s heavy. It sits on your chest. Dism is lighter. It’s the weather, not the climate. But”—and here he paused, tapping his spoon against the rim of his cup—“a lifetime of dism can feel like depression. Enough small rains, and you forget the sun exists.” “I think I understand,” she said

Dism , she thought. And then she let it stay. “No,” he said finally

The first time the word appeared, Mila was seven. She’d been drawing a sunflower in the margins of her spelling test—a lopsided thing with too many petals—when her pencil skipped. The tip scratched out a shape that wasn’t a petal, wasn’t a stem, wasn’t anything she’d intended. Four letters, small and crooked: dism . It sits on your chest

The man tilted his head. For a moment she thought he would laugh, or politely change the subject. Instead, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a worn leather notebook. He flipped through it, licked his thumb, stopped on a page.

She opened her notebook. She wrote: December 3: Priya leaves. The apartment feels bigger now, but not in a good way. It feels like a room after a funeral, when all the flowers have been taken away. Dism.