Quiet Arithmetic

The world keeps laughing in clean, unbroken sounds,
as if joy were a language everyone learned at birth.
Cafés are full. Hands are full.
People speak of weekends the way birds speak of sky
without checking the weight of their wings.

I walk among them carrying numbers instead of dreams.
They cling to my pockets, whisper in my chest,
count the steps between today and tomorrow.
Nothing dramatic, nothing worth a siren
just the slow math of survival,
the constant subtraction of comfort.

I smile when others do.
I nod at stories of ease, of plans made lightly,
as if planning were not a luxury.
They do not hear the quiet in my head,
the way every choice asks a price before it asks my desire,
the way life has begun to feel like a receipt
I never remember agreeing to sign.

Hunger is not always an empty stomach.
Sometimes it is an empty margin for error.
A thin line between “almost enough” and “not quite,”
between dignity and the word please
caught painfully behind the teeth.

I want to ask.
God, I want to ask.
But shame has a firm grip on my tongue,
teaches me silence like it is a virtue.
It tells me to be grateful, to be patient,
to carry this weight quietly so no one notices
how my hands are shaking.

At night, when the noise finally rests,
I inventory my worries like fragile objects.
Bills become shadows on the wall.
Prices learn my name.
Even sleep feels expensive
it asks for peace I cannot afford.

What hurts most is not the lack,
but the loneliness of pretending there is none.
Watching normal life happen inches from my face,
close enough to touch,
far enough to be impossible.

So I stay quiet.
I measure.
I endure.
I learn how to disappear politely
inside a crowd that calls this living.

And if sadness settles in me,
it is not loud, not poetic.
It is practical.
It knows the cost of everything
and the value of nothing it can safely ask for.