I put the house on quiet.
Not a rule. A temperature.
Chairs remember where I left them.
Cups keep their heat longer than I do.
From the road I look composed.
People bless that word like grace before eating.
They do not hear the plate hum.
I learned to live in low volume.
Arrange my face as if it were flowers.
Fresh water, cut stems, a smile that doesn’t wilt in public.
Silence is not strength.
It is counting rations.
It is saying: this is all the light I can afford today.
I file warmth under “later.”
Later never arrives with a key.
Later stands outside, polite, and goes home
I am not who I was.
I don’t spill like I used to.
I don’t bleed for strangers on principle.
But the body keeps an old manual.
How to ache in private, how to pass as fine.
I rehearse answers that close the door softly.
I practice wanting nothing.
Wanting is loud.
Loud gets reported.
Still, the quiet fills with weather.
A draft that knows my name.
A rain that doesn’t fall, only waits above the ceiling.
The loop begins again.
Same corridor.
Same shoes by the mat.
Same mouth that doesn’t open.
No scene. No shattering glass.
Just a neat implosion.
The spine holding, the room intact,
and something small inside me sitting down.
If there is an earlier version of me,
she stands in the hallway with her hands behind her back,
watching the door that never knocks,
and she says, very softly, to no one.
“Say something. Anything.”
-Ikkel Y.-
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