Humpty With a Co-Pay

A journey through the quiet collapse of what we thought we could fix.

Artwork By Shain Parwiz

Psychology dressed itself like an interior designer,

walked into my head, and said,

“Well, we can work with this.”

Then she opened the windows to let the devourer breathe.

They lit incense where the devourer used to nest.

They rearranged the trauma, but didn’t remove it.

Put new curtains over broken panes,

called the drafts “character.”

They even framed my shame,

hung it in the foyer like conversation art.

The walls were weeping.

They painted them anyway.

Glossed over the grief.

Told me to “journal through the exfoliation of pain,”

as if a fresh coat could cover what never wanted to heal.

They say the foundation just needs “anchoring.”

I say it needs a lobotomy.

She offered affirmations like furniture catalogs:

“Here’s a mantra for the mornings.”

“Here’s a mood board for balance.”

All pastel palettes,

None of them were built to bear weight.

There’s a closet I don’t open,

not because I’m scared,

but because it opens into a stairway that ends in a wall.

They left it off the blueprint.

Or maybe that’s where I buried my before-self.

They brought in throw pillows to cushion my collapse.

Put mirrors on every wall,

but none of them show my face correctly.

Too fogged. Too fractured. Too far gone.

I’ve lived in this place longer than I’ve been alive.

Every door creaks like a memory.

Every light switch flickers like a stuttered thought.

Every crack in the marrowed floor says,

“You were here when it all went wrong.”

She started getting frustrated

the kind of tired that hides behind clinical kindness.

So she upped the meds: stronger pills, longer names.

But all they did was make the zombie in me

forget it was dying.

She kept talking.

I stopped responding.

I was a fly on the wallpaper,

watching the version of me

try to navigate a blueprint drawn in broken glass.

And outside?

A flat in Singapore costs enough to bury four lifetimes.

Therapy’s almost the same,

you pay so much to fix things

they already told you were unfixable.

And when you finally feel something again,

all that comes out of your wallet is flies.

I’m not some open-floor concept waiting to be feng shui’d.

I’m not a blank canvas.

I’m blood on the carpet.

I’m the sound between the floorboards

when everyone thinks the house is empty.

And yeah, I know the story.

The nursery rhyme. The crack. The fall. The fabled fix.

She tried to put me back together again,

like I was Humpty with a co-pay.

But you can’t reassemble porcelain

with pity and worksheets.

All the king’s men wore clinical coats,

and cracked jokes while cracking me worse.

So I staged it,

the damage, the silence.

Let them walk through and say what they always say:

“This space has potential.”

Yeah.

Potential to collapse.

Potential to haunt.

Potential to remember what others keep repainting.

I’ve stopped asking them to rebuild me.

Now I just keep the door locked.

Let the drafts speak.

Let the grief grow roots behind the plaster.

Let the walls whisper back in black spores.

Some places aren’t meant to be flipped.

Some homes were never built to host healing.

And me?

I was never staged

I was stripped bare.

Authors Note:

I know it’s been a little quiet from me, but I’ve been battling a pretty rough bout of sickness. I’m still writing, though, and today, I’m sharing Humpty With a Co-Pay, a raw piece born from those long nights of silence and frustration. Thank you for your patience, for reading, and for reaching out.

After this, I’m going to try and get some more rest. I’ll be back fully in a couple of days. And I’m also letting you know that The Version of Me That Died Too, the next part of the Rust and Silence series, will drop on Monday. Stay tuned.

-Shain