Title: Whispers in a Locked Room

The first time I almost told you I loved you, I blinked instead. One slow, deliberate blink—just long enough to hide a war behind my eyelids.

I’ve learned that silence, when it stretches long enough, becomes a language. And I’m fluent. I speak in “I’m fine,” in carefully curated emojis, in polite nods that keep everyone far enough away to stay safe—but not suspicious.

When I was sixteen, I stood in the kitchen with my hands around a glass of water I didn’t want. My mother was yelling—about grades, maybe, or the way I slouched, or how I didn’t talk enough. And I remember thinking: If I disappeared, would the noise stop? I said nothing. Just sipped water like I needed it to exist.

Some truths rot when exposed to air. Others bloom in the dark, like bruises. I’ve never been able to tell the difference, so I keep everything hidden just in case

There are things I’ve never said out loud:

- I hate how easily I pretend.

- I once cried during a toothpaste commercial—not because of the ad, but because the couple smiled like they didn’t have secrets.

- I worry I’m too much for people… and still not enough.

Sometimes I imagine speaking these thoughts. But they clog up in my throat like thorns. So I whisper them into blank notes on my phone that I never save. I write them on fogged mirrors. I speak them aloud only to the night.

You asked me once why I seem distant. I laughed. I always laugh when I’m close to the truth.

Here’s what I wish I’d said:

“Sometimes I feel like a ghost haunting my own body. I wave, I smile, I keep moving. But ’m not here—not really. I’m drifting just behind the version of me you think you know. She’s charming, I’ve heard. She remembers birthdays and double-texts when you're sad. But she’s just a suit I put on to keep the real me quiet.”

I didn’t say that. I smiled instead and changed the subject to your playlist.

Because love feels like a door I don’t deserve to knock on.

There’s a boy I used to sit next to in class—his name was Amir. He had a scar near his eyebrow and eyes that always looked like he was about to say something important. We never really spoke. But once, on a rainy afternoon, he turned to me and said, “Do you think people are born lonely, or do they become that way?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Because I’d been carrying that question in my ribcage for years, like a locked letter I was afraid to open.

We’re all searching for echoes that sound like answers.

There are nights—quiet, aching ones—when I do speak the unspeakable. To the walls. To the stars. To no one at all.

I say:

“I miss you.”

“I’m scared I peaked at seventeen.”

“I don’t think I’m lovable the way I am.”

“I sometimes replay moments from five years ago and wish I’d done them differently.”

“I still think of you when I hear that one song, and it both hurts and helps.”

“I’m trying. I swear, I’m trying.”

The room never answers. But it listens. And that’s enough to keep me going sometimes.

When I write these words, I feel them echoing back—not for sympathy, not even for release. But just to prove they’re real. That I’m real.

There’s power in putting ink to a feeling. In giving shape to the formless ache that sits in your chest like fog. These thoughts may not make it into conversations or group chats or kitchen table confessions—but they live here now.

On this page.

In this silence.

In the space between lines where truth waits, patient and trembling.

And maybe, just maybe, someone like you will read this. And you’ll think, Oh... me too.

And for a moment, we won’t be so alone with the things we can’t say out loud.