Unchosen, Yet Unbroken

There are nights when silence feels like a predator,

waiting behind every door frame, breathing in rhythm with my own.

I eat dinner with the echo of my fork, I listen to the hum of an empty room,

I wonder if walls ever get tired of holding someone who talks mostly to themselves.

The world tells me solitude is noble, that independence is a crown.

But crowns are heavy, and some evenings it presses like a storm against my skull.

I miss the simple certainties:

a hand reaching for mine, a voice to soften the corners of the day.

Instead, I reach for the air, and it always reaches back but never holds.

Fear then comes quietly, not as panic, but as a slow erosion,

the thought that maybe I am unchosen, that maybe my life will be a string of half-finished conversations with the moon.

Yet in the hollow there is also a strange power.

I learn the geography of my own heart, the way it beats steady even with no other rhythm beside it.

I learn that loneliness is not a verdict, but a teacher, showing me where I end and where the world begins.

Some nights I cry into the vastness.

Some nights, I laugh at nothing and the sound fills the room like a sudden sun.

This is the truth of walking alone,

there will be terror and freedom, emptiness and expansion,

a fear that lingers but also a strength that no one can take away.

And though the road stretches dark, I keep moving,

because somewhere within the silence my own voice is waiting

and it is enough.