I learned young how quickly a life can disappear. One day there was a mother, a home, animals I loved, a room that knew my name, books and toys, friends and familiar hallways.

And then there wasn’t.

No goodbye to the life before. No place to put the memories. No permission to speak of what had been mine.

I learned to carry it quietly.

Perhaps that is why silence still finds the tender places in me. Why an unanswered call can become more than an unanswered call.

Why someone’s absence can awaken an old question:

Did I matter?

I have spent years trying not to ask too much of people.

I listen to their stories ~
their work, their families, their ordinary Tuesdays.

I remember the names. I remember the details. I remember the dinners where something important was said.

And sometimes I discover they don’t remember at all.

So I make myself smaller.

I leave certain stories at home. I tuck away the grief. I stop mentioning the pages I’ve written and the worlds I am creating. I tell myself not everyone wants to go deep.

But there is a loneliness in being loved only where the water is shallow.

I don’t need anyone to rescue me from my history. I don’t need every conversation to hold my sorrow.

I only want, sometimes, for someone to turn toward me and ask,

How are you?

And stay long enough to hear the answer.

I want the things I have created to matter after I am gone. The poems. The stories. The pieces of a life I spent so many years retrieving.

I want someone to understand that these pages are not simply words. They are evidence. I was here. I loved.

I lost. I remembered. I survived. I made something beautiful from things I was once forbidden to speak about.

And still, there are days when I wonder whether I am simply too much ~

too complicated, too emotional, too interested in what lives beneath the surface.

But perhaps I have been asking the wrong question. Perhaps I am not too much to love. Perhaps I have simply spent too much time making myself smaller for people who are more comfortable with less.

There is one soulful companion who never asks me to do that. She lies beside me without needing an explanation. She knows when I am quiet. She knows when I am hurting.

She knows when it is time to simply stay.

And somehow, in that wordless presence, I am reminded ~

being seen does not always require words.

So today I will not disappear. I will not chase anyone who has chosen silence.

I will not make decisions from the frightened place inside me that still remembers how easily a whole world can vanish.

Today I will stay.

With my words. With my memories. With the life I have built. With the little soul beside me who reminds me to keep living it.

And I will leave tomorrow for tomorrow.

Because maybe being unseen doesn’t mean I have disappeared. Maybe it is simply time to stop measuring my existence by who is looking.

I am still here.

And this time, I will not erase myself.