Youngest

It started with silence— the gentle kind you mistake for peace, until it curls into your ears and begins to whisper. A house once dressed in safety slowly unstitched itself, revealing a kind of hurt you kept calling love. The laughter that once warmed the walls thinned into nothing, and the quiet that replaced it learned how to swallow you whole. You kept stitching broken things that never wished to be mended, too busy rescuing ruins to see yourself sinking— drowning in your own sorrow, solitary, undone. You stopped expecting rescue the day you realized no one even noticed you were drowning.