There is a silence that doesn't come from peace - but from being unheard for so long that even your own voice forgets what it once sounded like, you speak, but the words feel foreign, as if borrowed from someone who deserved to be listened to.
You laugh at the right times, nod in conversations, send the right messages, post the right things, and yet - none of it reaches anyone, you could scream and it would echo only inward, rattling through a hollow you that no one else can see.
There are people who say they love you, and maybe they mean it, in the only way they know how - but it's not the kind that finds you in the middle of the night when your chest feels too tight to breathe, and your mind replays every moment you ever got in the way, every time you thought you were too much, or not enough.
And sometimes, you don't even want help, you just want someone to notice that you're not okay without having to explain it again, and again, and again.
You've learned how to make space for everyone's pain but your own, you cradle their wounds while ignoring the way your own body shakes from holding it all, no one asks how heavy its gotten, no one wonders why you always say, "don't worry about me".
But you do worry, you worry all the time, you worry that you're too broken to be loved in a lasting way, you worry that one wrong moment, one slow reply, one missed signal - will make them walk away.
So you give, you over-give, you hand people parts of yourself like offerings, hoping that if you just love hard enough, they'll stay... they never do, or they do - but they never really see you, not the you behind the mask, not the you who cries after being told "you're so strong", you never asked to be strong, you asked to be held.
And it's cruel - how the world praises your resilience without ever questioning why you had to be resilient in the first place.
No one sees how you collapse when the room is finally empty, no one hears the way you talk to yourself when the shame kicks in - blaming yourself for every silence, every distance, every person who left without saying goodbye.
You make excuses for them, you say they had their reasons, you tell yourself you're too sensitive, you've memorized the language of self-blame so fluently, you could write poetry in it, you already are.
Sometimes you wonder if you were born with too much feeling and not enough shield, you wonder if there's something wrong with how deeply you break over things others brush off, and then you hate yourself for breaking at all.
But listen - there is nothing wrong with you, you feel too much because this world has taught you to feel nothing, you hurt because you carry what others refuse to hold, you shatter because you were never taught how to ask for softness without sounding like a burden, and maybe no one has ever stayed long enough to see it - but you are not the broken one, you are the evidence of what love could be if it learned to kneel, you are the quiet that someone will one day choose to hear, not because you're screaming, but because they're finally listening.
But until then - I know you're tired, I know you're exhausted of being the strong one, the silent one, the forgotten one.
So here - rest, not everything has to be survived, not tonight, you don't have to prove your worth by bleeding for it.
You are enough in all your aching, all your unraveling, all your not-knowing-how-to-ask.
Let the quiet be heard for once.
Let it speak.
Let it say: I am here, I am hurting, please - stay.