Row, a patient with delusional disorder, has been cured. But the side effects of recovery seem to be only beginning.

At the clinic, Row’s doctor, family and friends gather to congratulate him. He is handed a discharge form confirming that his delusional disorder has been cured.

He returns to work with a sense of loss he cannot name. Over the course of an ordinary day, his thoughts keep drifting back to the cause of his illness: Iris, the girlfriend who existed only in his mind.

After work, he goes where they always used to meet. He orders one coffee instead of two, and watches children on the swings in the park. She never appears.

The day ends. At home, he finds a small paper boat folded from a sugar packet in his coat pocket, and he begins to cry. This is the side effect of being cured.

Most stories about mental illness end with the cure. This one begins there and asks what recovery takes away. If the person you loved was a symptom, getting well means losing her, and grief for someone who never existed has no funeral and no one else who knew her.

The story does not romanticize illness. The doctors are kind, and they are right. It only insists that being right and being whole are not the same thing.

Almost nothing happens. The story covers a single day after discharge, and its tension comes from counting rather than from plot.

Objects and callbacks

Iris cannot appear, so every feeling is carried by an object, and nearly every object returns.

In development

Current work focuses on the ending: how a quiet close can become the story’s most forceful moment, and where its weight should fall. A second question is how far a story can be carried by objects alone, and how many callbacks it can hold before they feel arranged.