The hostel room was silent except for the sound of my own breathing. I lay motionless on the narrow bed, staring at the blank wall before me as tears gathered slowly in my eyes, slipping down the sides of my face and disappearing into my ears. My chest felt unbearably heavy, as though my heart was carrying emotions too large to be named. I did not know whether I was grieving, breaking, or simply losing myself somewhere between exhaustion and loneliness.

My head spun endlessly. My eyes burned as if fire had settled behind them, my lips were dry, and even thirst felt too heavy to answer. A glass of water stood only a few steps away, yet my body refused to move. My arms felt drained of strength, my legs stiff against the bed, as though invisible chains had wrapped themselves around me. Even changing my sleeping position seemed impossible.

The sound of my heartbeat echoed loudly inside my chest, violent and restless, like it was trying to speak a pain I could not understand. I no longer knew what was right, what was false, or where exactly I stood in this vast world of living people. All I knew was that I was lost.

And when I closed my eyes, darkness did not simply appear — it crept toward me from every corner, slowly swallowing every thought, every memory, every remaining piece of warmth within me.

Perhaps I was crying. Perhaps I was begging. Perhaps I was silently falling apart.

I could feel the tears continuing to slide down my skin, but even breathing had become difficult. The room felt unbearably hot, suffocating, empty of life. In that moment, more than anything else, I wanted my people beside me.

I wanted my mother’s lap beneath my head — the safest place I had ever known. I wanted her fingers running gently through my hair while she whispered soft words only mothers know how to say. I wanted my sister nearby, teasing me the way she always did whenever Mother praised me, calling me names that somehow still carried love within them. I even wanted my father’s quiet presence close to me.

But instead, I lay there alone on my hostel bed, surrounded by walls that held no warmth at all, hoping for comfort in a room that had none to give.

Perhaps, to some people, these emotions would sound foolish — exaggerated words written by someone too fragile for the world. Some would laugh quietly and call it “too much.” Some would read a few lines, lose interest, and move on with their lives as though these feelings had never existed at all.

But maybe a few would understand.

Maybe somewhere, someone else had also stared at a blank ceiling at midnight, feeling their chest collapse beneath the weight of emotions they could not explain. Maybe someone else had also wished, in the middle of their loneliness, to become a child again for just one moment — to return to the warmth of their mother’s presence and forget the cruelty of growing up.

The truth is, pain has always sounded dramatic to people who are not carrying it.

And perhaps that is why the saddest battles are often fought silently — behind tired eyes, dry lips, trembling breaths, and ordinary faces pretending to survive another day.

But tonight — 25th May, 2026, at 11:17 PM — this pain felt real enough to consume me entirely. It was the unbearable realization that perhaps I had become nothing more than a burden in the lives of the people I loved. A walking storm. A human complication. As though my existence carried not comfort, but only additional pain, endless worries, and problems that quietly turned other people’s lives into their own private hell.

And the cruelest part of all was that no one had ever directly told me this.

The thought had simply grown inside me over time — slowly, silently — fed by disappointments, misunderstandings, distance, and the habit of blaming myself for every broken thing around me. Until one day, it no longer felt like a thought at all.

It felt like the truth.

It was a truth I desperately wanted to run from, yet no matter how far my thoughts wandered, it followed me like a shadow stitched to my existence. I was suffering just like countless others out there — the only difference was that I could speak about my pain, while many of them carried theirs in silence.

Perhaps that is the tragedy of being human.

We scream from within ourselves, hoping someone will understand the weight we carry, while the world continues moving as though nothing is breaking inside us at all. And sometimes I wondered whether pain truly becomes lighter when spoken aloud… or whether words simply give suffering another way to survive.

Then perhaps the feeling was not sadness alone.

Perhaps it was emptiness — the kind that slowly hollows a person from within until they begin to feel like a living body carrying a tired soul. A loneliness so deep that even surrounded by people, warmth still feels impossibly far away. The kind of silence that does not exist around you, but inside you.

And maybe that was the most terrifying part of it all — not the tears, not the sleepless nights, not even the pain itself — but the growing feeling that something inside me had already gone numb long ago.

As if I was no longer truly living, only existing. Breathing, speaking, smiling at times… while somewhere deep within me, a part of my soul had quietly died without anyone noticing.....

And so, for tonight, I leave these feelings here — scattered across these words like pieces of a soul too exhausted to carry itself any longer.

Perhaps tomorrow I will return to this again. Perhaps I will understand myself a little better. Or perhaps I will simply learn how to survive another day wearing the same invisible wounds.

But for now, let the night keep my pain for a while.

Let me disappear into the silence, and someday, when my heart is a little less heavy, I will return.

bye

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