There is a fire in which we burn, days in which we are silent, pains we endure, blows we swallow. There are nights when we don't find sleep, days when we cry out, minutes when we vanish, hours when we are consumed. There is joy that slips from our hands, love that melts within us, seconds in which we recall that life comes only once! Years in which we suffer always, others in which we simply sit, a third in which we perish, the last in which we rest. A life in which we walk alone, a destiny in which we share fortune and our gladness, death and life—made one! There are tears we shed upon our faces in the moments of despair, others that we weep, guilty before eternity's gaze. There is a passion that devours us, another that condemns us, a love we abandon in those rare, blessed days. There is a rage we swallow down, a fear we cry into the dark in the seconds when we know how hard it is to simply be...
# One I am the solitary figure in the crowd— a single raindrop on the ocean's face, a grain of sand that slips between the fingers of time itself. No one calls my name. The wind carries it away like a leaf that never learned to stay. I am the pause between two heartbeats, the silence after the song ends, the space where light goes to die. They walk past me as if I were a shadow, as if my presence were merely the absence of something more important. I wear the mask of ordinariness well— the gray coat, the downturned eyes, the smile that says nothing at all. But inside, I am screaming. Inside, I am a million galaxies collapsing into the smallness of a single word: *alone*. Yet there is a strange grace in this solitude, a hidden majesty in being overlooked. For in my invisibility, I am free— free from the burden of being seen, free from the weight of belonging, free to exist in the pure mathematics of myself: one. Just one. And perhaps that is enough.
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