Decompression
What if depression isn't a collapse—but a condensation?
Every Tuesday, two groups meet in adjoining rooms at a counseling center. In one, a clinical psychologist teaches his patients to manage their symptoms, build tolerance, and fight the flood with the tools of science and will. In the other, a former pastor who lost his faith—and found something else in its place—sits in silence with his circle, offering not answers but attention, holding space for whatever emerges from the dark.
They are strangers to each other, these two circles. But they are bound by the same invisible force: the weight of lives lived under pressure. A woman who maintains an immaculate apartment to hold back the void. A security guard who keeps a ledger of nothing, cataloging the long, empty hours of the night shift. A caregiver whose love has become a form of desperate, endless doing. An artist who screams in steel. A mother whose daughter sees the world as weather—pressure maps drawn on fogged glass, knots of feeling that no one else can perceive.
When a child speaks a single word—compression—it changes everything. It offers a new way of seeing: not depression as a hollow to be filled, but as a force that shapes, transforms, makes. A diamond from coal. A neutron star from a dying sun. Something precious, forged under impossible weight.
But the press is not metaphorical. It is real. It takes a life. It forces each of them to confront the hardest question: What is love when it cannot fix? And it leaves behind an empty chair that becomes the group's most eloquent teacher.
Decompression is a novel about the long, slow, sacred work of learning to breathe within a new, denser form. It is about the fight and the sacrament, the mechanic and the mystic, the levee and the lantern. It asks whether healing means lifting the weight—or expanding the space within which it is carried.
Lyrical, philosophical, and deeply human, this is a story for anyone who has ever felt the press of existence and wondered what might be made from it. A testament to the brutal and beautiful truth that sometimes, to find the light, you must first pass through the impossible density of your own becoming.
The weight is neither enemy nor angel. It is simply weight. And we get to decide, in the darkest quiet of our own hearts, what we are building under its press.
Decompression is a work of fiction, but its questions are real. Its characters are imagined, but their struggles are not. This novel offers a new language for an old pain—and a quiet, stubborn hope that the press might be making us into something we were always meant to become.