# Loneliness I don't know the name of this ache, this hollow that opens inside me like a door no one remembers closing. The world spins on without me— I watch it turning, bright and certain, while I stand in the shadow of my own silence. There are people everywhere, their voices braiding together into something that sounds almost like music, but I am the space between the notes, the unheard part of the song. My hands forget what it means to be held. My voice grows thin, translucent— something that passes through rooms without leaving a mark. At night I count the small distances: from my bed to the window, from the window to the stars, from the stars to the infinite and back again to myself. I have learned the grammar of absence, how to conjugate emptiness in all its tenses, how to make a home in the space where someone else should be standing. And yet— this loneliness is mine, this particular shape of solitude, this slow ache that proves I am still here, still reaching, still real enough to hurt.