He had learned how to measure himself by effort. By how often he reached first, how carefully he listened, how many times he reshaped himself to make room for other people’s comfort. It wasn’t that he expected anything extraordinary in return. He would have settled for consistency. For gravity. For the sense that what he offered didn’t evaporate the moment it left him.
Lately, everything did.
Words went out intact and came back thinner, delayed, warped. Reactions instead of replies. Familiar names answering with distance. He told himself it was timing, or stress, or the slow erosion adulthood inflicted on everyone. He told himself this because the alternative—that something was fundamentally missing between him and the people he loved—felt too indulgent, too self-centered to claim.
So he kept trying.
But effort had begun to feel mechanical. He reread messages not for clarity but to check whether they still sounded like they belonged to him. He noticed how often conversations ended without resolution, how often care returned as noise. Even when someone answered, it rarely landed where it was meant to. The echo came back misaligned, like sound bouncing off the wrong wall.
At some point, he realized the quiet wasn’t temporary. It was cumulative.
That night, he opened his phone without urgency. No spike of panic, no heaviness pressing behind his ribs—just a smooth, practiced calm. He stared at the blank space where a thought could become visible and felt, distantly, that this should concern him more than it did. He typed a few sentences and erased them, not because they were dishonest, but because they asked for too much. They explained. They reached.
He didn’t want to reach anymore.
What he finally wrote was simple, almost neutral.
The curtain falls whether anyone’s watching or not.
He read it once—not to hear how it sounded, but to confirm that it was accurate. That was the relief in it. Accuracy. It didn’t feel dramatic. It didn’t even feel sad. It felt finished, the way a room does after the lights are turned off and there’s no reason to stay standing.
He posted it and set the phone down. No pause. No second thought. Like crossing something off a list.
Later, someone would scroll past it and feel a flicker of recognition—not enough to stop, just enough to register as interesting. Poetic, they might think. Someone else would linger longer, thumb hovering as they searched for the right way in. They wouldn’t want to misread it. Wouldn’t want to make it awkward. They’d decide to come back to it when there was more time.
No one noticed what wasn’t there. No softening language. No explanation. No reaching.
The line sat quietly, unremarkable at first glance, like a stage after the house lights dim—orderly, empty, waiting for nothing. And much later, when its meaning finally sharpened into focus, it did so without urgency or remedy.
By the time the audience understood, the lights were already out.
There would be no encore.