A Witness in the Windowless Room
Sometimes,
my life feels like a reality unfolding in a distant land,
and I am merely a witness,
watching through a pinhole
from a dark, windowless room
where I do not have limbs.
There is no door.
No sun.
Only the loud pulsation of my heart
beating against the bars of my ribs,
and the suffocating scent of my fears
curling like poison around my breath.
I watch myself laugh at dinner tables
where the conversations feel
like foreign films without subtitles.
I see my mouth moving,
hear the sound of my voice
agreeing to things
the girl in the room would never choose.
The girl on the screen
nods when she means no,
smiles when she wants to scream,
says "I'm fine" when she's dissolving
like salt in rain.
And I want to reach through
the pinhole,
shake her by the shoulders,
tell her to stop
performing happiness
like a scene from a Shakespearean play
for an audience
that doesn't even see her.
But I have no hands here.
No voice that carries
beyond these walls
that I cannot touch,
cannot measure,
cannot break.
The room smells like
childhood bedrooms
where I hid under blankets,
waiting for storms to pass
except the storms
never lived outside.
They lived in the way
adults spoke to each other,
in the way the world
stripped a child of the naivety
she thought would last forever
in the spaces between
what was said
and what was meant.
Sometimes I press my face
against the pinhole
until it hurts,
trying to see more
of the life I'm supposed
to be living,
but the view never widens.
It feels like walking across
a landscape in my nightmares
it is water,then grass,then nothing.
I see fragments:
her hands folding laundry
that doesn't belong to her,
her feet walking paths
she didn't choose,
her eyes looking in mirrors
and not recognizing
the reflection gazing back.
The worst part
is watching her
make decisions
I would never make,
staying in rooms
that make her small,
loving people
who love the idea of her
more than her actual self,
apologizing for taking up space
she was always meant to fill.
Because they told me
that walls listen and talk
I want to whisper through the walls:
You are not too much.
You never were.
Stop trying to fit
into boxes
that were never built
for someone like you.
But the pinhole
only works one way.
And wall, like the world has conspired
to not convey my message.
She cannot hear me.
She cannot see me
watching,
cannot feel me
willing her
to wake up.
The fears here
have their own ecosystem,
they breed in corners
I cannot reach,
multiply in the darkness
between heartbeats,
whisper things like:
What if you're not enough?
What if they leave
when they see
who you really are?
What if this is all
you'll ever be?
And the fog
gets thicker,
harder to breathe through, see through,
until I'm not sure
if I'm the one
in the room
or the one
on the screen.
Sometimes
I wonder
if this is what
dissociation feels like,
this weird splitting
between the self
that lives
and the self
that watches
the living happen
to someone else.
This distance
between who I am
and who I appear to be,
between what I feel
and what I show,
between the person
I was meant to become
and the one
I learned to be
for everyone else's comfort.
The pinhole shows me
all the moments
she should have said no,
all the times
she should have walked away,
all the chances
she had to choose herself
and chose everyone else instead.
And I am here,
limbless and voiceless,
watching her live
a life that feels
like wearing
someone else's clothes,
always a little too tight,
never quite right,
but she's forgotten
what her own clothes
feel like.
The room has no clock,
no calendar,
no way to measure
how long I've been
watching
this strange performance
of a life
that should be mine.
But sometimes,
just sometimes,
I see her pause.
Look around
like she can feel
someone watching.
Like she remembers,
for just a millisecond,
that there's supposed to be
more than this.
And in those moments,
the pinhole seems
to widen slightly,
the room seems
less dark,
and I think ,
maybe she can hear me
after all.
Maybe one day
the wall will crack,
Or it will send my words across,
the door will appear,
and I will step
from the windowless room
into the light
where she waits
for me to come home
to myself.
Maybe one day
the witness
and the witnessed
will remember
they were always
the same person,
just separated
by the walls
we build
when the world
becomes too much
to feel
all at once.
Until then,
I wallow
in this darkness,
breathing smoke,
heart beating
against ribs
that feel more like
prison bars
than protection,
watching through
the pinhole
at a life
I'm still learning
how to live.


I'm in awe. The creativity with which you crafted a lingering image. And the concise details>>>>>>