to exist

i’ve never felt real. not once—not in the way other people seem to be, with their voices carrying weight and their movements carving space. everything that has ever happened to me feels like it happened to someone else—like a dream i only half-remember. the moments slip through my fingers, leaving behind faint impressions, blurry and insubstantial. my life feels less like something i’ve lived and more like something i’ve been told about. when i try to trace the edges of myself, there’s nothing there to hold onto. my reflection feels foreign. my memories play out like scenes from a film, disconnected, their meaning just out of reach. i replay them sometimes, searching for a thread to tie it all together, but there’s only static. the worst part is the stillness. the crushing weight of feeling unmoored, like i’ve been cast adrift in a sea that doesn’t even have waves. everyone else seems anchored, tied to something solid. but i float, untethered, watching the world pass me by. there’s a hollowness to it all—a sense that i’m not truly "here," that i’m just a shadow flickering against a wall. i try to find connection, to ground myself in the people around me, but it always slips away. their words hit me like rain on glass, sliding down without ever soaking in. i nod, i smile, i say the things i'm supposed to, but it feels like a performance, like i’m mimicking something i’ll never quite understand. their laughter echoes like bells in an empty church, beautiful but distant—always distant. 

sometimes, i wonder if i’m a ghost; if i died long ago and no one told me—or maybe i was never alive to begin with. maybe i’m some unfinished thought, a fragment of something larger that got lost along the way. the world feels so vivid around me, so full of color and movement, but i can’t touch it. i can’t feel it. it’s like watching through a pane of glass, the kind so clean you forget it’s there until your hand slams into it, jarring and cold. i don’t know how to explain it to anyone else. 

how do you tell someone you’ve never been sure of your own existence? that your memories feel like fog, your body like an empty vessel? that even in your happiest moments, there’s a voice whispering that it’s not real, and that none of it ever was? i lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, trying to grasp something, anything that feels solid. but the more i reach, the further it drifts. my hands close on air, again and again. i try to tell myself it’s normal, that everyone feels this way sometimes, but i see it in their eyes. they belong to this world in a way i never have. so i linger, caught in the liminal space between dreaming and waking, unsure if i’ll ever find a way out. my life stretches before me, a labyrinth with no walls, no center, no end. it’s quiet here. too quiet. 

 —✶L