Emotional Detachment
From a psychological standpoint, emotional detachment is both shield and shackle. Sometimes it's deliberate, sometimes it creeps in quietly, like frost on glass. You stop feeling because feeling has become too dangerous. At first, the distance is a relief. You can see the storm without being soaked by it. But the price is steep. Every person becomes a variable, every situation a data point, every connection a calculated risk. The world turns into an equation where emotion is noise to be filtered out. And when you've been detached long enough, you start to forget what warmth even feels like.
Akin's POV
The ad was never meant to be a cry for help. It was a net.
I had spent an entire afternoon on the wording, sitting cross-legged on the dusty wooden floor of the old gym storage room. Light slanted in through a narrow window, illuminating motes of dust that floated in the air like tiny planets in suspension. The smell of stale varnish and rust clung to everything. Behind me, crooked shelves groaned under the weight of forgotten trophies, soccer championships from the early 2000s, a regional debate cup with a missing lid, a relay baton with the paint flaking off.
I wanted the ad to feel like a quiet signal sent into deep space. It should be beautiful, cold, and utterly without promise. The words had to resonate with the right kind of person: someone who wasn't looking for rescue. Someone who had already decided the fight was over.
"The Starlight Society."The name was deliberate. Celestial metaphors spoke to a particular breed of despair: lonely, expansive, but contained.
"Tell me again," J said from the corner, her back pressed against the wall. She had a notebook on her lap, doodling circles absently. "You're not trying to find people you can… save?"
Her tone was careful, but I heard the unspoken question: What exactly are you building here?
I didn't look at her. My pen kept moving, refining the lines of the ad."No. I'm finding people who've already given up on the idea of being saved."
J frowned and ran a finger across the tarnished plaque of a netball trophy. "And if they change their minds?"
"They won't." The certainty in my voice wasn't bravado. It was the product of years of my own resignation. "We're for those who've seen the beautiful emptiness of the cosmos. We don't give them light. We just… stand with them in the dark."
She shifted, hugging her knees. "It sounds like a suicide club."
I shrugged. "It's just honest."
Her eyes studied me for a moment too long, but she didn't argue further. J liked to think there was a way out for everyone. I preferred to accept that some people had stopped looking for one. She was the reason we'd have meetings at all. I was the reason they'd be called The Starlight Society.
The first messages came in that night.
Prae's was the longest; a clinical, almost sterile breakdown of her achievements and the crushing expectations behind them. Her life was a flawless equation: top of the class for five consecutive years, perfect attendance, competition wins. But reading it, I felt the chill of numbers without soul. Her story didn't plead; it simply calculated that her existence no longer had value.
Tom's message was heat where hers was ice. It was a furious, jagged sprawl of words. He wrote about humiliation at the hands of bullies, about teachers who looked away. His sentences came in short, stabbing bursts, the textual equivalent of slammed doors. He didn't want understanding; he wanted to go out with a mark no one could erase.
Then came Win and Kao. They wrote together, switching voices mid-sentence, a tangled duet of affection and exhaustion. Their dream was to vanish into some hidden corner of the country, a forest, a waterfall, where they could breathe without the world's disapproval pressing down on them. Every word was drenched in bittersweet poetry, like lovers rehearsing their final scene.
Pim and Lita's messages were cautious at first, as though they were checking if I was safe to talk to. Slowly, the details emerged: whispered meetings, the sting of public shame, the weight of rejection from family and friends. Their plan wasn't about escape so much as reclamation, a way to take back something the world had stolen.
Noi's story was the quietest, and somehow the loudest. It was a monologue of self-disgust, punctuated by details of skipped meals and hours spent staring at a mirror. Her words felt slow, sinking, like she had been on a descent for years and could already see the bottom.
Ken's was barely a paragraph, just an existential question typed out at two in the morning: If no one remembers you, did you ever exist? There was a stillness to his words, like someone already half a step out the door.
I read them all twice, committing each to memory. They weren't just messages—they were constellations. Each is a point of light in my carefully drawn sky.
And then came the anomaly.
A blank account. No posts. No profile picture. Just a single, trembling star emoji.
At first, I almost deleted it. Too small. Too soft. The others had spoken with finality, their edges sharp and defined. This one was hesitant, fragile, a spark rather than a flare. It didn't feel like resignation. It felt like… searching.
I stared at it longer than I meant to.
When I finally typed my reply, I kept it stripped down to the essentials: a time, a place, and a single phrase, "Look for the lost trophies."
I didn't expect much. This "trembling star" wasn't in my script. I was the fisherman who had cast a net into waters I thought I understood. Every catch so far had been predictable in its pain. But this…
This felt less like catching something and more like spotting a light out at sea.
And for reasons I didn't want to name, that light made me uneasy.
Lesson on Emotional Detachment
In the end, emotional detachment is both armor and exile. It spares you the burn of other people's pain, but it also shields you from their warmth. Akin thought of himself as an observer, a careful architect of other people's endings. But in removing himself from their emotional equations, he had also removed the possibility of hope. The trembling star, Niran, was a crack in his fortress. A small, uninvited glow that threatened to warm a place he had kept cold for too long. And that scared him more than the darkness ever had.