There’s a silence that doesn’t come from solitude,
but from erasure
from standing in rooms that never made space for you,
and realizing you were never meant to.
Not forgotten
just never remembered.
There’s a difference.
One stings,
the other hollows you out.
You look at the photos,
hear the laughter,
feel the pulse of a moment you were never part of.
And you wonder
how can absence feel so loud?
It’s not that I lost my place.
It’s that I never had one.
Not in their stories.
Not in their language.
Not even in the corners where misfits find each other.
You can’t miss what you never had
and yet,
you ache for it anyway.
Your body holds the grief
of being unseen,
unwritten,
unaccounted for.
You don’t drift because you want to.
You drift because the ground refuses to claim you.
Because every time you reach for the familiar,
it recoils
not with cruelty,
but indifference.
And somehow that’s worse.
To not even be a scar on the surface.
To be so gently, so quietly excluded
that you begin to wonder
if you were ever real at all.
But you are.
Even if they didn’t see you.
Even if they never made room.
Even if you don’t belong there –
you exist here.
And that… is a beginning.