The dormitory never sleeps.
Lights hum like insects,
shadows twitch across the floor,
and every night I remember,
this is not where I am visiting.
This is where I live.
This is where I am kept.
The other girls go home.
They vanish into weekends,
into kitchens filled with noises
and smell
and warmth.
They complain about parents,
about rules,
about being seen too much.
I would give anything
to be seen too much.
Instead, I return to my bed,
my small metal drawer of belongings,
my ceiling with its web of cracks.
It stares down at me every night,
silent,
unchanging,
a reminder that nothing waits
beyond these walls.
My parents are smoke now.
They pass through my thoughts like strangers.
Their voices are static,
distant,
sometimes I wonder
if they’ve already forgotten me.
Maybe I was too easy to let go.
Maybe I was never worth holding onto.
I don’t plan for the future.
The future is a locked door.
The future is another hallway
that leads back here.
I have stopped imagining anything else.
Sometimes, in the quietest hours,
a thought flickers,
a cruel kind of hope:
one day I’ll grow wings.
But even as it comes,
I know it isn’t true.
Even birds fall.
Even birds are crushed beneath tires
on roads no one bothers to cross.
So I fold myself smaller each night,
make myself a shadow
so no one will notice how much I’m missing.
I practice the art of disappearing,
learning to dissolve into silence,
to be overlooked,
to vanish without the world
ever pausing to ask why.
And if I write it down,
it isn’t for saving.
It’s proof I was here,
that once there was a girl in this building
who waited,
and waited,
and was never collected.
Found this in my drafts. I wrote this on the 21st April at like 4ish in the afternoon.
