I learned how to carry weight quietly, how to make pain look like routine, how to nod at the world as if nothing inside me was breaking. There were nights I reached outward, not with hands but with something softer, something that hoped to be held. I called without sound, sent pieces of myself into the dark, waiting for them to land somewhere, waiting for anything to return, but nothing ever did.
Just air, wide and indifferent, slipping through my fingers like I had imagined the need itself. I told myself I asked wrong, that maybe I was too much or not enough, or simply mistimed in a world that keeps moving. So I folded the reaching back into me, tucked it behind ribs and breath, where it could ache in private, where it would not be seen failing.
And still, it tries. In small, unguarded moments, in the way my chest tightens at kindness, in the pause before I say I am fine, there is a part of me that has not learned the lesson, that keeps extending into emptiness. Not because it expects an answer, but because it does not know how not to. And maybe that is the heaviest thing, not the silence, but the hope that keeps speaking anyway.
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