reading room
The Light Changes Key
And the world wakes up. And it looks at me. And it doesn't like what it sees.
So it blinks. So it names me wrong. So it asks me to become easier to explain.
But I am still breathing— slow as tide, slow as a word I haven't learned yet.
I keep my colour in my mouth. I keep my name in my chest.
And maybe it won't love me. And maybe that's okay.
I didn't come here to be wanted. I came here to stay.
Some mornings that line goes quiet.
Some mornings the world rises without me in it.
Light walks across the wall like it doesn't need my permission.
The day speaks. I say nothing. This is one of those days.
The alarm sings once— I let it finish.
The second time it feels like accusation.
My phone fills with small demands: be clear, be useful, be more.
The ceiling holds me the way water holds a body that has stopped kicking.
I think about the mirror and how it keeps insisting. How I say girl and the room hears almost. How being seen can feel like being edited mid-sentence, cut before the meaning arrives.
I think about the friend who didn't fade— six months ago, a night of messages, each word sharpened, each silence louder than the last. No warning. Just a before and an after that still hasn't learned how to touch.
I think about how the world loves lines— straight ones, productive ones, lines that move forward without stopping. As if my brain were a clock that refuses to keep time out of spite. As if rest were theft. As if difference were debt.
The day waits. Still. Unforgiving.
Productivity hums somewhere far away, a song I know but can't sing yet.
And for a moment I don't want to stay. Not loudly. Not dangerously. Just in the small way where staying feels heavier than sleep, where even breathing feels like effort.
Then— something small. The light changes key. Beautifully. Just enough.
My chest rises without asking what I plan to do next. Loss loosens its grip and becomes space. The friend I lost taught me how deeply I can feel. The futures I failed taught me which ones were never mine.
This body— argued with, misread— has still carried me through every morning that asked too much.
Nothing resolves. Nothing redeems itself. But I am still here. Not as proof. Not as promise. Just as breath. Just as weight.
I sit up. The floor meets my feet. The world wakes up— and this time, I go with it.
— Lilith