He was six years old the first time someone asked him:
"Why don't you react?"
The other children cried when they fell, laughed when they played, screamed when they were scared.
He didn't.
He simply watched — not cold, not angry — just… distant.
As if life was happening one step ahead of him, and he was always arriving late.
People assumed he was shy. Maybe polite. Maybe obedient.
But the truth was quieter than all of that.
He wasn't hiding his emotions.
He couldn't feel them fully.
At first it was small things — forgetting how excitement felt, forgetting that urge to talk, forgetting the warm sense of attachment kids feel to friends.
Every year, something else faded like an old photograph losing its color.
He didn't know why.
No one around him knew either.
Some nights he sat on the floor of his room, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember what happiness felt like. He could describe it, but he couldn't reach it, like a dream fading the moment he woke up.
He wondered if there was something wrong with him.
Then he wondered if maybe this emptiness was normal.
And finally, he stopped wondering at all.
By the time he turned ten, emotions became like distant, muffled sounds.
He didn't hate people — he simply didn't attach.
He didn't love people — he simply stayed respectful.
He didn't fight — he had no anger.
He didn't comfort — he had no softness.
He was polite, disciplined, controlled.
The teachers praised him.
But humans are not built to be empty.
The mind knows when something is missing, even if the heart forgets.
And so he developed a habit:
Whenever he felt something faint — confusion, heaviness, a strange nausea inside the chest — he would stop whatever he was doing and quietly observe it.
As if studying a rare event inside his own brain.
Most kids feared monsters.
He feared feelings he couldn't understand.
One winter night, something small broke inside him.
He found an old drawing he made when he was five — a smiling family.
But he couldn't remember what that smile felt like.
He touched the paper, waited, searched for any warmth in his chest…
Nothing.
Just a hollow space where something should've been.
He didn't cry.
He didn't panic.
He simply folded the paper and said softly to himself:
"Maybe humans aren't all the same."
It was not said with sadness or anger — just acceptance.
A quiet acceptance that he was different.
But the truth was darker.
The emptiness wasn't natural.
It wasn't his personality.
It was a warning.
A sign of something sleeping inside him — something old, something tied to shadows that whispered when no one else listened.
And on the night he turned sixteen, that "something" would wake up.
But for now, he was just a boy with respectful manners, a simple presence, and empty eyes that saw the world clearly… yet felt nothing inside.