Don't be silly!

The stars screamed too loudly tonight. Each flicker a piercing cry, like they knew her secrets, the ones she’d buried under a thousand shattered shields. She pulled her knees tighter, her chest caving under the weight, her throat tight with words that never made it past her lips.

Alone in the universe?

That question clawed at her, every syllable a jagged edge, a reminder of the silence she couldn’t escape. She parted her lips to speak it into the cold air, but the words died, suffocated by her own shame.

She shouldn’t have run. But staying meant drowning in the storm of broken voices, the constant battle that never stopped. Her mother’s words, sharp as glass, slicing through her skin, and her father, as always, just disappeared—silent, useless, like a ghost haunting a broken home.

“What’s wrong with you?” her mother had screamed, the accusation tearing at her soul.

And in her mind, she screamed back—everything. Everything’s wrong with me.

The field was her sanctuary—a place where the walls she’d built couldn’t reach her. Where the silence of their house couldn’t follow. The grass prickled against her bare skin, but it wasn’t enough to make her move. She deserved to feel every inch of discomfort. She was nothing but the weight of her own failures.

She looked up at the stars, desperate for them to offer something—anything—to fill the emptiness that gnawed at her. “If you’re out there,” she whispered, “If anyone’s listening, say something. Please.”

The silence came crashing down, heavier than the screaming she’d left behind. Her skull pressed into the earth, the cool dirt sinking into her skin, and the sound of her heartbeat was the only thing that kept her tethered to this broken world.

Then, the silence cracked.

Not her heart, but the stillness. A voice—soft, like a shadow cutting through the night. “Don’t be silly.”

She snapped up, her body reeling, hands shaking as they sank into the dirt for support. “Who’s there?” she demanded, her voice cracking under the weight of everything unspoken.

No answer. Just the rustling of grass, too alive, too real. The stars above her didn’t blink, their cold gaze piercing, watching. Judging. Waiting.

“You’re not alone.”

The voice was close now—too close. Inside her, echoing in her mind. She recoiled. “You’re lying.”

The stars blinked again, slow and deliberate, as if mocking her. The voice didn’t waver. It softened. It understood.

“We’re all connected,” it whispered, as though the very ground she stood on knew her. “You just forgot how to see us.”

She wanted to scream at it. Tell it that connections don’t mean anything when you can’t touch them. When they’re ghosts. When no one is ever really there. But instead, she broke. “Why does it feel like no one’s ever here for me?”

The stars pulsed, faint flickers in the dark, their light sharp, cruel. “Maybe you’ve been looking in the wrong places.”

Her throat clenched. She stood up, brushing the dirt from her legs, but the earth didn’t let go of her. It held her like the weight of everything she couldn’t escape. She stared up at the sky, blurred by the tears she never gave permission to fall.

“I don’t know how to find it,” she whispered, her voice shattered.

The voice, like a memory, grew quieter. “Then stop running.”

The world stilled. No stars blinked. No wind whispered. Nothing. Just the silence. Thick. Suffocating. Crushing. She stood, a solitary figure in the middle of an empty field, consumed by a question that would never leave her. Was the universe speaking to her, or was it the weight of her own mind collapsing under the pressure?

Her breath trembled in her chest as she began to walk back, her body broken by the weight of everything, yet still moving.