Three weeks, and my mouth is a locked drawer.
It’s fine, I tell the mirror. It’s always fine.
I can order by touching pictures.
the little bowl glows, the noodle smiles,
a finger becomes a sentence no one argues with.
Maps shepherd me like a quiet aunt;
the blue dot believes in me more than I do.
They say I’m settling well.
I nod in the right places,
offer nouns like folded towels:
station, bathroom, receipt.
My friends are kind.
they lean their language toward me, slow and careful, and I place my answers down like teacups.
Nothing spills. (That counts as intimacy.)
The keyboard stares back.
keys rearranging like shy birds.
Do you ever think the letters choose you first?
#isitjustme
Rooms cost numbers. Dorms cost less.
Math is gentle. People aren’t.
I make a list no one sees:
- if my alarm shouts, will I deserve anger?
- if it doesn’t, will I deserve it more?
- what if breathing through the wall is a crimes?
- what if everyone is human and I’m the alien?
(What if translation is perfect and I’m still unread?)
They call it overthinking, kindly,
like a forecast: light spirals, dress warm.
I wear compliance like a coat two sizes down;
it pinches in the places I don’t name.
Contracts help. Three months in a share house,
then I’ll reconsider the dorm, reconsider speaking,
reconsider the shape of my silence.
I keep receipts for every decision—
paper is easier to forgive than people.
Friends wave. I wave back with weather reports:
crowded train, cheap curry, clean streets.
Facts don’t frighten anyone.
Feelings do. I inventory facts until I pass for safe.
At night I practice Woolf-like sentences that never leave the lamp:
- I am a room arranged to be harmless.
- I am a window that doesn’t ask to be opened.
- I am the sound a door makes when it refuses to be a door.
Morning arrives like a polite intruder.
I say hello correctly. Goodnight is harder.
Too close to Please don’t go.
I close the day gently, as if someone is sleeping,
as if someone might wake and leave if I am loud.
It’s been three weeks. I haven’t cried in their language.
They think I am brave. Perhaps I am.
I keep existing where no one can hear the crack.
When I say “I’m fine,” the room believes me.
When I say nothing, it believes me more.
Ikkel
Follow on Instagram