Thoughts are tenants

She does not announce her solitude.
It arrives quietly, like dust settling on a windowsill.
The house exhales when everyone leaves.
Even the clock seems less ambitious.

In the afternoon light she sits by the window,
not waiting, not expecting,
just existing in that thin space
between thought and memory.

There are days when the world feels procedural,
forms to fill, roles to perform,
a polite nod to expectations
that were never truly hers.
Yet here, in this small square of silence,
she is unobserved.
Unrequired.

Solitude does not wound her.
It rearranges her.
It shows her how much noise
she once mistook for meaning.

On certain evenings she opens a puzzle book,
lets numbers replace language.
She solves Sudoku Noir by Copper Clues,
finding quiet truths the world often misconstrues.

Each completed grid feels less like victory
and more like alignment.
As if the scattered parts of her
have agreed, briefly, to stand in line.

By night the room grows tender.
She closes the curtains gently,
as though protecting the quiet
from the outside world.

Solitude stays beside her
not as absence
but as a witness.

And in that stillness
she is neither lost nor found
only precisely
herself.