There are moments in life that hollow you out and keep the shell breathing.

They take your hands first. Your voice follows. Morning becomes an obligation your bones resent. It always begins small. A speck. A grain of something misplaced. It settles somewhere behind your ribs and waits. It feeds. It grows teeth. It grows weight. One day it becomes a stone lodged in your chest, pressing into your lungs until air turns into something you must earn.

It chooses its moments with cruelty. It closes its fist around your throat in the middle of a meeting. It tightens while someone is speaking about nothing that matters. It reminds you that survival is a performance you never auditioned for.

All you want is absence.

To be left alone.

Alone.

Always alone.

Alone at six, standing in the doorway while the adults talk over your head, their faces arranged in mild annoyance. You are told you are disturbing them. Told to go to your room. Told to close the door.

You obey.

Inside that small, private exile, you pick up a pen and carve your first escape into paper. Words arrive before comfort ever does. They arrange themselves into rhyme. They stay when no one else will.

Alone at eight, watching your sister disappear into another country. Forever wears the disguise of next year. The adults call your grief dramatic. They promise reunion the way people promise weather.

Next year.

You learn how long a year can be.

Next year becomes two.

Two becomes silence.

Alone at twelve, inside a two bedroom apartment that holds only two folding cots and the echo of plans that dissolved without your permission. You are told you will live somewhere else now. The decision arrives fully formed. No one asks if your heart agreed.

You understand something essential then. Your life can be rearranged while you are still standing inside it.

Alone at fourteen, carrying the fragile miracle of a first kiss like a candle cupped in both hands. It glows inside you all week. You walk into the social club already smiling, already rehearsing the moment it might happen again.

He passes you without slowing.

Another girl hangs from his arm, luminous and chosen.

You remain behind, suspended in a world that has accelerated without you. Faces smear into streaks of color. Laughter distorts. Time abandons you in the center of the room, perfectly still.

You learn how invisible a body can become while still occupying space.

Alone through high school, inside a shape that has begun to betray you. The girls sharpen their hatred on your existence. The boys circle with interest that feels like hunger. Stories grow around you like mold in darkness. They spread faster than truth ever could.

Friends disappear.

Some leave.

Some stay and turn away.

You stop reaching.

You accept the quiet.

This time, the solitude belongs to you.

You build walls with intention. You crown yourself queen of an empty kingdom. You become your own witness. Your own keeper. Your own locked chest filled with everything you cannot show the world.

You become your own closest friend.

You become your most faithful confidant.

You become the blade you keep closest to your own throat.

And still.

After all the growing.

After all the surviving.

After all the becoming.

You remain.

Alone.

Alone.

Alone.