25/07/25

I feel something tremble in my throat — I want to speak, but my words melt away before they take shape. I swallow. I shut my mouth. Because what I think, what I feel, might break someone.
I breathe in, measure the silence between your breath and mine, and decide: this stays unspoken.
There’s a longing to say “I want this,” “this is how I feel,” but my tongue carries too much weight in that space. So I sit still, hiding in my silence. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want someone to leave.

In my head, the struggle grows. Thoughts drift against each other like boats on a too-small lake, colliding and crashing, yet I cannot set them free.
I sigh, but only in the quiet and I’m afraid that whisper is too loud for you. So I swallow again.

If I shared this, advice would come. Well‑meant but unsolicited. It slides past me, touches nothing. Because I’m not good at opening up my inner self. It feels like exposing my skin, fragile, breakable.
So I carry it all alone. My fear that I’m nobody without silence. My sadness that I can’t be myself, because I always put others first.

And the same resistance rages within my ribs: I want connection, but fear showing I need help.
Then someone says: try this, say that, do such and such. But in those solutions, my voice disappears even more.
So I stop.

There is sorrow in remaining seated. There is a little person that slowly melts in his own mind, because he doesn’t allow himself into the daylight of conversation.
And nobody knows. I share it with no one.

Still, sometimes I ask in my head: can you bear the silence? Can you let me exist with my quiet grief, without trying to fix it?

The conflict is not a storm in you. It is a storm in me, invisible, unshakable.

24/07/25

Gaza

I saw a child in black and white on my screen, his eyes were not eyes but hollow holes where hope spilled out, like a crow leaving its nest in a storm. No one held him, except the dust.
And I thought: how many deaths are needed for breaking news? How many bodies fit into a single silence? I scrolled on, I ate my bread, I felt filthy.

In Gaza, people die on schedules of power and shadow at night there’s fire, during the day there’s silence.
We have sunlight, sunscreen, attics full of things, and no clue what to do except donate and cry in bed.

I want to shout: come on, let’s go! We’ll fly there, sail there, walk there if we must. We’ll build bodies into walls, arms into bridges. We’ll throw ourselves in front of the rockets, to stop forgetting.

But who hears ordinary voices? Who measures the scream of a girl against the weight of oil and weapons and silence? How hard must you pray for heaven to listen?

And the world does nothing, just repeats rules. Ministers at New Year’s parties speak louder than a hundred fathers raising their child out of rubble. And I write this, as if it means something.

But I tell you, if words can carry weight, let this be a beginning, a kick in the gut of the powerless, an echo that stays, until someone finally says: come.

18/07/25

Somewhere Between the Lines

Sometimes it feels like I’m planning myself in pieces:
breakfast with a smile, lunch with company,
evenings filled with just enough noise
to muffle the echo of something I don’t dare to name.

I write appointments into my calendar as if they’re spells,
meant to ward off whatever waits in the quiet.

The days grow fuller, but something empty grows inside me.
It’s not sadness, not exactly —
more a rustling discomfort,
like leaves in a room with no windows open.

I sleep a lot, or I want to sleep,
or I dream of sleep without ever really falling into it.
Sometimes I think sleep is the only thing still holding me.
As if the nights know what I’m hiding from during the day.

The world sees movement and assumes I’m fine.
But what if all this moving is just escape?
What if every smile is a trick,
every activity a disguise?
I sometimes smile in photos,
but there’s always a split second
in which I become something else —
something I’d rather not let the camera see.

It’s not that I feel nothing.
I feel everything — just not in the right places.
Joy gets caught in my throat,

warmth slides off me like rain on oil.
People say I’m blooming,
but inside I’m still winter.

I don’t tell anyone.
Because the moment you say it out loud,
people start searching for what’s broken —
who broke it.
But maybe it’s just me.
No reason, no culprit.
Just something quietly disappearing,
while everyone watches and applauds
what they think is recovery.

17/07/25

If I Don’t Write, I Disappear

I write because otherwise I get stuck inside my own body.
As if my thoughts slowly turn into a kind of mud,
covering everything that used to be clear.
It sloshes against my ribs, pulls at my throat,
makes it harder to breathe without saying something.
And sometimes I want to scream —
but instead, I just open a new page.

The words need somewhere to go.
If I keep them inside, they get heavy,
start to rub against everything that’s meant to stay quiet.
They settle in my shoulders, my neck, behind my temples —
until all I want is to sleep, just to stop feeling them.

I don’t write to explain anything.
I write to escape,
to keep from drowning in the things I can’t say out loud.
The page doesn’t look away.
It doesn’t ask questions.
It doesn’t say, “But don’t you have everything?”
It lets me exist in a language no one needs to understand but me.

What I write isn’t beautiful.
It’s not a story — it’s survival.
As if I have to pull myself out in sentences,
thread by thread,
because otherwise I’ll stay tangled in something I can’t get out of.

Sometimes I read it back and don’t recognize myself.
Sometimes I do.
Sometimes I think: this is the closest I’ve ever come to being real.

And no one ever has to read it.
That’s the beauty of it.
It just has to leave me.