Enough to remind me that someone out there saw me—not the version I pretended to be, but the quiet, hidden one.
The one who sat in stairwells, trying to remember how to breathe.
Lowering my eyes from him and back down to my phone I don’t want him to see the loneliness lingering in my eyes.
Dane
She’s different today.
It’s in the way she moves slower, smaller, like her body’s here but her mind’s a million miles away.
The woman who used to hum under her breath when she thought no one was listening now sits frozen at her desk, staring at her phone like it’s feeding her poison she can’t stop swallowing.
I know that look.
It’s the look of someone slipping quietly, beautifully into the undertow.
Her office door is cracked just enough for me to see her reflection in the glass wall.
Her eyes are red-rimmed, her hair pinned up like she’s trying to hold herself together with bobby pins and caffeine.
I shouldn’t care this much.
I shouldn’twatchher like this.
But hell, I’ve been doing it all my life.
Penn-Rose — the girl who used to sit at the back of class and write poems on her hands when she thought no one noticed.
The girl who smiled at the wrong boy and spent the next decade trying to survive it.
Blake was a star back then.
Golden. Untouchable.
But gold rusts when you look close enough.
And I looked close.
I watched the way he’d talk too loud, laugh too hard, always needing an audience.
I watched her fade, inch by inch, into his shadow.
And now, years later, here she is again, sitting in her glass box, breaking in silence while the world hums around her.
A notification pings from her phone.
She flinches.
Then goes still.
Her lips move a whisper I can’t hear, and she sets the phone face down like it might explode.
God, it kills me.
The way she hides her pain behind professionalism.
The way no one else in this office sees her drowning.
