This piece is a meditation on what it means to give with your whole heart and be met with silence. It is about devotion, erasure, and the quiet death of being unseen. It is fictional and deeply personal.

Imagine living with someone much older than yourself. Someone who bears the weight of the world within their mind, each sorrow, unraveling truth, an echo of suffering etched into their bones as if inscribed by time.

Each night, you sit beside them by the fire. They speak of chaos, ruin, and knowledge too immense for peace. Every night, you listen. You do not merely hear them. You absorb them. You make a quiet place within your chest for burdens that are not yours. You set aside your thoughts, dreams, and desires and attempt, through aching devotion, to shape something beautiful in return. A gift. A balm. It is a gesture meant to say that you see them and are still here.

Your offerings are met with absent nods and hollow stares. Their gaze returns to the fire, the void, and the sorrow they have married. Again, you are unseen. Again, you are unheard.

The cycle continues for weeks, months, and years. One day, you lift your eyes and see what surrounds you. Not filth and not waste, but a hoard of tenderness left untouched. The room is overrun with forgotten gifts, letters written with trembling hands, meals prepared with quiet urgency, and words spoken with trembling hope. They have gathered like dust upon the soul.

You have built a landfill of love. It is not formed of neglect or carelessness but of grief too thick to receive. It is built from numbness that paralyzes and escapism mistaken for endurance.

Yet, with a sacred instinct, you persist.

One evening, you plan something different. It is something final, a desperate act born of despair.

You throw a party.

You bake a cake with hands that tremble from more than fatigue. You flavor it with desperation and vanilla. You adorn the room with streamers that flutter like lost prayers in the golden light. You craft invitations, each stroke of ink shaped with reverence, your handwriting a quiet plea for someone to come.

This is no celebration. This is your last offering. It is your final attempt to open the windows and clear the air of sorrow.

That night, they do not return.

They are not late. They are not remorseful. They do not return at all.

The silence does not arrive suddenly. It blooms slowly and suffocatingly until the room is filled with it.

All you have made, this effort so deeply born of hope, must be dismantled.

The dismantling is the worst part.

You remove the decorations from the walls. The tape resists you, curling beneath your fingernails. The balloons have withered into pale, crumpled relics, their surfaces dulled and waxy, like fruit long abandoned. They hang in the corners like lungs without breath.

The frosting has solidified. It is no longer sweet but defensive. The cake breaks like a brittle bone. The plates sag beneath the weight of untouched sugar. A scent lingers in the air, once warm and inviting but now soured by time.

You gather the remnants, candles that never knew flame, gifts mummified in wrapping paper, and spoiled food fit only for decay’s children. You press them carefully into a black plastic bag. You tie it with slow, deliberate fingers and walk it to the bin outside. The wind stirs the confetti across the lawn.

There is no farewell, and there is no music. There is only the closing lid and the footsteps of someone who has learned that even grief leaves stains.

What follows is not rage. It is not sorrow. It is the hollowing.

You return inside. The temperature has dropped, and the light offers no warmth. The walls press closer, and the air thickens.

Your fingers hesitate when you reach for your phone. You compose no messages. There is no one to answer. You cry, not loudly and not for comfort, but quietly, because you have learned the world is already drowning in its pain, and there is no room for yours.

Your soul withers by degrees. The once-gleaming resilience of your youth has shriveled into something fragile and barely animate.

This story offers no lesson. No revelation awaits. No light pierces this tunnel.

The truth, cruel and plain, is that this is how we die.

We do not always die in the body. We die in spirit.

We die when we are ignored. We die when we are unseen. We die when our gentlest efforts are discarded like debris. We die when the ones we reach for recoil. We die when those we wish to save vanish into themselves.

To love a world that exalts those who mock it is a torment. To try again and again with nothing in return is to give oneself to erosion.

Your swollen face and blocked sinuses greet you in the morning. They are your heralds. You move toward the hearth again, that place of old ritual. There they sit, still as statues carved by grief, gazing into some endless interior abyss. Their silence is heavier than the room.

You speak. You tell them they did not come home. You say it softly, as though speaking to a ghost.

Suddenly, they rise. They embrace you. They tell you that you are right, that your feelings are valid, and that your logic is sound.

Before your lungs can fully draw the breath of their presence, they return to their place before the fire. Just as quickly as you were reassured, you weren’t. Their eyes no longer rest upon you. Their mind is no longer near.

You remain there, the memory of the embrace cooling on your skin. You hold the space they abandoned, and you begin to question.

Where did I go wrong? Was it in my relentless devotion, unwavering love, or blind hope? Or was it in my neglect of my own needs and desires, my failure to see my worth?

I do not belong in this house. If not here, then where?