When the mind becomes a locked house, once warm, now shuttered from within—the windows fogged by silence, the doors swollen from disuse—outside, the world seems to rage on all the brighter, louder, quicker than the pulse beneath my skin can follow.
When each morning breaks like glass—shards of light across a floor—I find time pooling in corners, thick and unmoving. I trace cracks in the world instead of paths forward. I learn the language of stillness, of small breaths. I become fluent in the art of appearing.
When they tell you to rise, to hustle, to transform pain into fuel, doubt into drive—what if the self they demand I become is a stranger? What if I have already burned too long in the furnace of expectation—each smile a forged mask, each word a rope pulling me away from the truth of what I feel?
When depression does not shout, but murmurs, hums in the bones—when it is not absence, but presence in another key, a lower chord, constant, like distant machines in a factory long abandoned—it does not want to kill, but to erase; to soften the edges until you become less than a shadow.
When isolation—its twin—does not always come from solitude, but arrives in crowds, in conversations where I nod on cue, laugh on time, vanish behind practiced gestures—when the world demands I be better, without asking if I can simply be whole.
When the days of growth feels like betrayal, healing feels like pretending, even the thought of progress—of stepping into a world quick to slice, to measure, to mock—feels like walking naked into a hailstorm.
There is more than this—no more to achieve, no more to prove, but more to be—a life that does not require constant defense, a self not carved into palatable pieces, a world without performance. I do not know if I believe in that world, but some part of me aches toward it—quietly, like roots pressing through stone.
When maybe that is enough, for now: to ache, to press, to not vanish—not yet.
When I remember—though the memory is not solid, not whole—a time when breath came easy, when the day unfolded like paper boats down brooks in golden summer. When I remember bare feet in grass, and the world humming softly—not the harsh clatter of obligation, but the slow song of discovery. When each pebble was a galaxy, each puddle a portal. Then, I was light. Then, I laughed without earning it.
When I ask, “Where did it turn?”
When I search the seam, the fault line between then and now, and cannot find it. There was no ceremony, no closed door—only small trades, each day: a piece of wonder for a bit of sense, a dream for a number, a question for an answer. When slowly, the trades stopped feeling optional. Now joy arrives dressed in receipts, must be justified, scheduled, performed. When childhood joy had no witness, no need to be shared to be real—it simply was. When adulthood is built on proof—on minutes and milestones and metrics. I mourn that child in silence.
When still I ask, “When did I agree to this? When did the game become a task? When I began to edit myself before I even spoke?” It happened in passing—like sand slipping through fingers. When I clutch handfuls of silence and try to shape it back into joy.
When they say it is the way of things, that growing is shedding, that we must put away childish things—but I did not put them away—I lost them in the dark, one toy train at a time. When I lost the joy of simply dreaming, the voice that sang without needing to be good, the hours that stretched, not shrank.
When I see children now—how their feet run before thought can stop them, how their faces betray every feeling, bright and raw—I envy them, and I mourn the child that could play with them still.
When it simply comes heavy.
Still, some part of me turns—like a plant to pale light. I reach through glass, through years, for the child who still lives in echoes, in shadows, in the corners of songs I once knew.
If I could just remember him fully—what he saw, what he knew before they told him otherwise—maybe I could unlearn this weight. Maybe I could walk, not march. Maybe I could be, not prove.
When maybe, just maybe, joy will come—not as a reward, but as a return.