Notes — 2:14 a.m.

I keep talking
like someone is still listening.

Words leave me
and echo back wrong,
thinner than when I sent them,
like they lost something on the way.

Maybe it’s myself I lost along the way.

I don’t know when it started,
this feeling of speaking into rooms
that don’t remember my voice.
When words stopped landing
and started just passing through.

When care started feeling
like mere obligation.
Like an answer is only a way
to get the notification off their screen.

I talk like I’m being careful not to wake anyone.
Like my voice might be the problem
if it stays too long in a room.
Like speaking too loudly in a quiet theater,
and nobody says it but I know that it’s me.

I keep adjusting myself mid-sentence,
trimming things down,
sanding off the parts that feel inconvenient.

It’s strange how effort can feel invisible.
How reaching can feel like falling forward
with no ground waiting.

A freefall without a parachute,
and I know how this ends.

I wonder sometimes
if I’m actually quiet
or if I’ve just learned how to disappear politely.

The blank screen doesn’t interrupt.
It doesn’t misunderstand.
It doesn’t look away halfway through a sentence.
It doesn’t care.
It doesn’t pretend to.
It lets me finish the thought
even when I don’t know where it’s going.

I keep everything here now.
The things I can't say.
The things that it would be too
self-centered to express.
The words that never made it out.
The versions of me that didn’t fit
where I thought they belonged.

Like a pair of jeans that don’t button
no matter how much I squeeze.

I don’t need an answer tonight.
I just need somewhere
the sound doesn’t die immediately.

If this is all that hears me,
at least it stays.

Even if it doesn’t echo.

Notes — 3:47 a.m.

I don’t have much to say anymore.
Not because there’s nothing there,
but because it doesn’t seem to matter
where it goes.

Most things sound the same once they leave me.
Muted.
Distant.
Like they were never meant to land anywhere specific.
Shouting into an empty void
hoping for an echo that doesn’t come.

I used to write here to feel better.
Now it’s just where thoughts go
when they don’t have another place.

But they have to go somewhere.
They have to go somewhere.

I don’t feel upset about it.
That’s the part that stands out.
It feels settled.
Like realizing the room has been empty
for longer than I noticed.

Like the movie is over and
I’m the last in the theater.

I think this is what quiet actually looks like.