There are days like this
when even memory feels tired,
when the past does not ache
but simply sits,
heavy and unfinished.
I walk through my own thoughts
as through an abandoned house
nothing broken,
nothing welcoming.
Only dust where something once mattered.
I do not cry anymore.
That was an earlier language.
Now sadness speaks in delays,
in unanswered messages,
in the way my name sounds distant
even when spoken kindly.
People assume healing is loud,
that survival announces itself.
But some of us heal by shrinking,
by asking less of the world,
by lowering our voices
until pain stops noticing us.
I am not dramatic.
I am exhausted in a precise way.
The kind that comes from hoping carefully
and being wrong quietly.
If this life were a sentence,
it would trail off
not ending,
just losing confidence in itself.
And tomorrow will come,
as it always does,
not to save me,
not to harm me,
only to continue
what I have already learned
how to endure.