What Remains Unseen

The world does not know
there is anything missing.

Something exists
outside the frame,
unlit,
unremarked,
never counted.

In the visible hours,
everything appears intact.
Attention circulates freely.
Admiration has room to wander.
Nothing seems withheld.

There is a version of freedom
that requires an audience.
It is light,
performative,
easily mistaken for wholeness.

And there is another.

It does not announce itself.
It does not interrupt the day.
It waits until no one is watching
and then becomes necessary.

It is not named.
It is not claimed.
It is not meant to be found.

This is where excess goes.
This is where appetite rests
when it does not wish to be seen.

The world praises what it can recognize.
It never asks what makes the balance possible.

And so everything appears complete,
while something remains
deliberately
out of sight.

Protected: The Discipline of Silence

I wonder if one day
someone will hear me in the silence—
not the words I shape for the world,
but the echoes that bleed
between breaths.

If they will see
how thought coils tight like wire,
how the weight of it all
turns stillness into a scream
no one else can hear.

I wait,
haunted by the hope
that someone might finally notice—
the fractures beneath the calm,
the way I am both present
and vanishing.

Until then,
I remain unheard,
a ghost of myself,
aching to be recognized.