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It began with quiet.

Not the gentle kind, not the hush of safety, or the silence of peace. No. This was the kind of quiet that seeps beneath the skin. The kind that watches. That waits. That teaches you to hold your breath before you even know what breathing means. I was born into that quiet. Into rooms where kindness was earned, if it came at all. Into a world where light was rationed and love had a price.

I learned to flinch before I spoke. Learned that joy was dangerous. That softness was a risk I couldn’t afford. I became careful. Precise. A ghost in my own home, haunting spaces I was never meant to fill.
And the world didn’t notice. It rarely does with people like me. Silence doesn’t echo.

So I became useful.

I folded myself into the shape of what was needed. In kitchens. In bedrooms. In every tiny space between someone else's wants. I stayed three steps ahead of forgetting, just to be tolerated.

They called it love. But it wasn’t. Not really.

The man I built my life around isn’t cruel. That would’ve been too simple. He is absent. Present in body, gone in the ways that mattered. His affection was routine. A kiss on the forehead, like muscle memory. We shower together, but not out of want, out of ritual. I cook his dinners in silence, pack his lunches like offerings, and lay out weather appropriate clothes each morning, shielding him from storms he never noticed were already living in me.

Because that’s what I did. I kept people warm who never once asked if I was cold. Because my heart had become a lighthouse for people who only ever visited during storms.

And still, I ached.

Not for more. Not even for tenderness. But for someone that saw me. For hands that didn’t need prompting. For a gaze that lingered, not out of politeness, but hunger. I wanted to be taken without apology. Stripped of control. Touched in a way that said: You don’t owe me anything back.

But I never asked.

Because asking felt like too much. Because being loved in return was never guaranteed. Because I am still that boy, somewhere, learning how to bleed without making a mess.

So instead, I dreamed.

And a boy, still inside me, waiting to be loved loud enough to stop vanishing in plain sight.