Nathan grew older.
He was already fifteen now.
His body stretched taller, his shoulders wider, his eyes quieter. The boy who once sat quietly on a bench had become a young man who walked with silent gravity. His voice had deepened into something soft but sure, though he rarely used it unless he had to. Most of his conversations happened in his mind—between the thoughts he heard, the truths he absorbed, and the questions that had no answers.
And with every passing year, something inside him felt heavier.
It wasn't just the voices anymore.
He had learned how to manage those—the endless mental currents from others, the buzzing thoughts and whispered fears. He could tune them out now, most of the time. Could smile and nod, speak when spoken to, laugh at the right moments. He knew how to be the version of himself people needed to see.
But it was the *understanding* that wore him down now.
He had seen too much. Not in the dramatic way heroes do in stories, but in quiet, repeated truths that built up over time like dust settling on windowsills. Truths about people. About how shallow emotions could be. About how few truly *saw* one another.
That most people didn't know how to love beyond their fears.
That people said "I'm fine" and "I'm happy" because they had forgotten how to say anything else.
That even the ones who cared for him—*truly cared*—still didn't understand him.
He remembered trying to tell his parents once, when he was eleven. Trying to explain the voices, the way he could hear what people were thinking even before they moved their lips. They had listened. Listened carefully. But then came the hesitation, the concerned glances, the too-soft tone of voice that always followed: "You're just imagining things, sweetheart."
Or worse—"Maybe you're just...sensitive."
So Nathan had stopped trying to explain.
He didn't blame them.
He loved them still.
But that love existed on a different plane now—warm but distant, like sunlight through glass.
He carried his loneliness quietly, like a stone tucked behind his ribs. It was always there. Not sharp, not unbearable, but *permanent.* Something he had learned to live with, though he still secretly wished someone else could carry it, just for a little while.
---
To pass the time, Nathan filled his world with other people's stories.
Movies became his window into imagined lives—where people said what they meant, cried when they were hurting, and held each other like it was the only thing that mattered. He didn't watch for entertainment. He watched for *evidence*—proof that somewhere, in some corner of the world, real connection was possible.
Sometimes he'd rewind scenes over and over, just to catch the flicker of truth in a character's eyes.
Just to feel something that wasn't his.
He tried sports, too.
Not because he loved them, but because they gave him a kind of relief—an escape from the weight in his head. There was no room for thoughts when you were running full speed, chasing a ball, feeling your lungs burn and your legs scream. For a few seconds, especially in the quiet after a perfect throw or a perfect goal, he could feel...stillness.
And in that stillness, for just a breath, he could almost believe he was normal.
---
But nothing called to him the way nature did.
On weekends, Nathan would disappear into the woods behind the edge of town. He wouldn't tell anyone. He'd just walk, sometimes for hours, until the noise of cars and people faded into birdsong and rustling leaves.
Nature didn't lie.
It didn't wear masks.
The trees didn't pretend to understand him, and the river didn't expect him to smile.
He would lie beneath the canopy of green and stare at the patches of sky above, watching the clouds drift past like ghosts of thoughts that didn't belong to anyone.
He'd sit by a stream, listening—not with his mind, not with his gift, but with something deeper. The same part of him that still remembered the tree from long ago, the voice that had called to him once in silence.
He wondered sometimes if that tree had been real.
Or the voice.
Or the old man.
But even those memories were fading now, buried beneath time and responsibility and the slow, daily work of surviving a world that didn't see him.
Still, he waited.
Sometimes, he'd sit for hours on a moss-covered stone, eyes closed, heart open, listening not for thoughts—but for a feeling. A presence. A truth that wasn't wrapped in confusion or filtered through someone else's pain.
He wasn't looking for answers anymore.
He was just looking for *someone.*
Someone who didn't wear a mask.
Someone like him.
But the woods remained silent.
No footsteps in the leaves.
No voices behind the wind.
No sign that he wasn't alone.
And the trees, for now, didn't answer.