it's been 3 weeks

8:16 PM

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

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