I. The Entry.
Every room has a gravity.
I step inside, and I feel myself pulled toward a version of me I've rehearsed a thousand times.
The one who nods at the right moments, who offers soft laughter, who seems to belong.
It is a fragile performance, threaded together with fear.
Because if I stop acting - if I let the silence inside me spill out - what then?
Would they hear it?
Would they notice how quickly I vanish even when standing in plain sight?
II. The Noise.
The air fills fast.
Their words collide in the space, thick with stories, jokes and joy that never quite include me.
I hear it all, but not as they do.
To them it is warmth, to me it is thunder, a storm I cannot withstand.
Every laugh pierces too sharp, every voice grows too close, until I am shrinking inside my own body, smaller and smaller, folding into the shadow of the person I pretend to be.
The world presses nearer, and I want nothing more than to vanish before they see the fracture in my smile.
III. The Silence.
Then the night comes.
The door closes behind me, and the noise I feared so much falls away.
At first there is relief, a breath I have been holding all day.
But silence has its own cruelty.
It is not gentle.
It does not comfort.
It reminds me, again and again, that I am hollow.
That no one noticed when I slipped away.
That even in the stillness I am not at peace - I am only empty, and the quiet makes sure I cannot forget.
IV. The Questions.
What is wrong with me?
Why do I recoil from the world's closeness, yet shatter when it abandons me?
Why do I ache for belonging, only to suffocate when it presses near?
I have tried to name this feeling - loneliness, anxiety, grief - but none of the words fit.
It is something deeper, something carved into the marrow.
As if my soul was born without the thread that ties people together.
I watch them connect, effortless, like stars forming constellations, while I remain a lone flicker in the dark, unnoticed, unliked, a light no one thinks to trace.
V. The Grief.
There is no funeral for this ache.
No ritual, no burial.
How do you mourn a thing you never had?
How do you grieve the love that almost came, the belonging that slipped away before it ever reached your hands?
It is an invisible loss, but it weighs heavier than stone.
It lives in the silence after laughter, in the echo of my own voice when no one responds.
It lives in the nights where I am both too tired to reach out and too lonely not to.
A grief without sadness is a grief that never ends.
VI. The Return.
And still, the cycle repeats.
the next day, I rise.
I dress.
I enter the rooms again.
I wear the mask again.
I laugh, I nod, I let them believe I am among them.
Because what else can I do?
To tell them would be to risk everything, and to stay silent is to endure everything.
Either way, the ache remains.
VII. The Cruel Truth.
This is the sharpest edge of loneliness: not being abandoned, but not never belonging.
Not the silence alone, but the silence that follows the sound of joy you can't touch.
Not being forgotten, but realizing you were never fully remembered.
It is the ache of being present and invisible all at once, of moving through life like a ghost no one believes in.
VIII. The Endless Echo.
I wish I could tell them - that every laugh in my throat feels rehearsed, that every silence I seek turns into a blade, that I am always balancing between craving the world and hiding from it.
But I cannot.
So I remain.
Alive, but dissolving.
Present, but unseen.
Smiling, but hollow.
And the ache continues, quiet, endless, echoing through every room, every silence, every heartbeat.
It is the constant companion.
It is the shadow I cannot leave behind.
It is me.
