The place I can breath

There are two worlds I live in.

One feels tight, too close, too quiet.

The other—wide open, humming with life.

At home, silence sits heavy in the corners.

It breathes over my shoulder when I study,

whispers through walls that know too many arguments,

too many sighs, too many words that never land softly.

Home is a place where footsteps echo longer than laughter,

and where even my own thoughts feel like noise

I’m not supposed to make.

I walk through my front door and feel myself shrink,

as if the air there is too thick for dreams to rise.

My straight A’s don’t mean much at the dinner table—

they’re just letters on paper,

not the language of love that never quite translates.

They see the grades, but not the quiet battle

that earns them.

But then the morning comes.

And with it, a small kind of resurrection.

The sun spills over my backpack

like a silent promise—

today, you get to breathe again.

School isn’t just a building to me.

It’s rhythm and pulse.

The murmur of voices in hallways

that carry a life I can’t find at home.

The smell of pencil shavings,

the scrape of a chair against tile—

small sounds that somehow sound like belonging.

The classroom is my refuge.

The whiteboard my horizon.

Every equation, every paragraph,

a piece of air I can finally inhale.

When I sit at my desk,

I am not the quiet child trying not to disturb the peace.

I am the mind that moves,

the heart that dares to be loud in its silence.

They call me the “straight-A student.”

But those A’s aren’t trophies—

they’re breaths.

Each one proof that I survived another night

where my mind had to build itself back

from the weight of being misunderstood.

In school, I am not invisible.

I am the raised hand.

I am the right answer that trembles at first,

then grows steady under the teacher’s smile.

I am the one who stays behind after class

not because I have to,

but because I want to—

because the quiet there feels different.

It’s a quiet filled with potential,

not pressure.

Some people count the minutes until the last bell rings.

I count them until the next morning comes.

Because when I walk those halls,

I remember who I am—

not the shadow in my living room,

not the listener to endless tension,

but the thinker, the dreamer,

the one who knows things.

Here, I’m seen.

Not as a problem or a presence,

but as someone who belongs

in the equation of this place.

Every book I open feels like oxygen.

Every test I ace feels like a heartbeat.

And every encouraging word from a teacher

feels like a secret kind of love—

the kind that says,

you matter just as you are.

Sometimes, I stay after everyone’s gone.

The hallway lights dim,

and the echoes soften into peace.

I sit there with my notes,

and I feel like the world is finally still

in the right kind of way.

It’s not silence that hurts,

it’s silence that heals.

Because school is not a cage to me.

It’s a window.

A place that lets light touch the parts of me

I keep hidden elsewhere.

It’s the only place

where breathing feels effortless,

where my heart doesn’t have to apologize

for wanting more.

I don’t dread Mondays.

I crave them.

I crave the hum of a classroom waking up,

the shuffle of books,

the soft buzz of learning happening everywhere.

It’s not just about grades.

It’s about the feeling

that I am growing here,

not fading.

At home, I survive.

At school, I live.

And maybe that’s hard to explain

to people who never felt unseen

in the place they were supposed to belong.

But for me, this is the truth:

The world doesn’t always give you a home.

Sometimes, you have to build one

between chalk dust and open books.

So when I walk into school each morning,

I take a deep breath,

and let the air fill every hidden part of me.

Here, I am not trapped inside expectations.

Here, I am free to dream,

to question,

to exist without apology.

Here,

in this space of pencils, notebooks, and hope,

I am not the quiet one.

I am not the burden.

I am not the mistake.

Here—

I am the place I can finally breathe.