2.》DN

Invisible

The hardest part wasn't feeling empty.

It was acting as if I wasn't.

Every morning, I stepped into school wearing the same invisible mask. By now, it fit perfectly. No one questioned it anymore.

"Morning."

"You okay?"

"I'm fine."

Three words.

They became my entire personality.

The hallway buzzed with voices as students rushed past me. Lockers slammed shut. Someone laughed so loudly that people turned to look. A group of girls talked excitedly about a party on Friday night.

Life kept moving.

Mine didn't.

I walked through the crowd like a ghost.

Sometimes I wondered what would happen if I simply stopped walking. If I stood in the middle of the hallway and disappeared without actually disappearing.

Would anyone notice?

Would anyone ask where I had gone?

Or would they just keep walking around the empty space I left behind?

Those thoughts scared me.

Not because I wanted them to be true.

Because I wasn't sure they weren't.

My teachers always described me the same way.

"Quiet."

"Responsible."

"Polite."

I suppose they weren't wrong.

They just didn't know that silence can be a place to hide.

During class, I stared out the window more often than I looked at the board. The clouds drifted freely across the sky, changing shape without asking permission from anyone.

I envied them.

I wondered what it felt like to move without carrying the weight of your own thoughts.

When the bell rang for lunch, everyone scattered toward the cafeteria.

I followed.

Not because I was hungry.

Because that's what everyone else did.

I sat at the same table every day.

The conversations flowed around me like water around a stone.

I nodded.

I smiled.

I laughed when everyone else laughed.

If someone asked for my opinion, I gave the safest answer I could think of.

Being forgettable felt easier than being seen.

Because if people really looked at me...

What would they find?

That question followed me home.

It waited for me in my bedroom, where the walls knew more about me than any person ever had.

I dropped my backpack onto the floor and lay on my bed without turning on the lights.

The darkness felt familiar.

Comfortable, even.

Outside, I could hear cars passing, dogs barking somewhere in the distance, and the ordinary rhythm of other people's lives.

Inside my room...

There was only me.

And the silence.

I reached for my notebook on the nightstand.

Its pages had become the only place where I didn't have to pretend.

I opened to a blank page.

For several minutes, I couldn't write anything.

Then, almost without thinking, I wrote a single sentence.

"I don't know who I'm becoming."

I stared at the words.

Something about seeing them on paper made them feel real.

Almost dangerous.

I closed the notebook immediately, as if someone might walk in and discover the truth.

But no one did.

No one ever did.

That night, before falling asleep, I had the strange feeling that something was about to change.

I couldn't explain why.

Nothing had happened.

It was just a quiet certainty resting somewhere deep inside my chest.

The kind of feeling you ignore...

Until the day you realize it was trying to warn you.

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