I tell people I stay up late because I’m a night owl. Well I am. I can definitely work better at night and I didn’t say that to sound cool and charming either but maybe it’s the quietness that works for me. Yet if I were honest, I would admit the night does not feel like a friend.
Night is when the honest broadcast begins. That’s when the broken record screams the “You are a fraud” as the last notification dies down. That throughout the daytime shows you have been forcing and faking all these interactions to claim it as connections. But the connection never arrives. No one is coming for me, still.
I don’t slam the doors, I laugh at every jokes, I say yes to everything, I welcome them in and I hand them sparkling water; of course I know they are not here for long and they will leave soon.
On nights when the silence grows, I open a blank document and try to list reasons I deserve kindness. I get to three, sometimes four, before the cursor blinks me into shame.
Not because the list is short, but because each line feels like a plea I should have outgrown by now. People my age write manifestos about changing the world; I’m here arguing with a cursor about whether breathing counts as a valid bullet point.
Then I realize that I chase bustling rooms and thank you messages and polite applause because I am terrified that if I stop, the echo up there in the attic will speak a sentence I believe. The sentence might be simple. You are ordinary. Not in the gentle, everybody‑belongs way. Ordinary as in: interchangeable. If that is true, what was all this effort for?
I keep blaming timing, chemistry, circumstance. Secretly I wonder if the missing ingredient is simply worth.
Hold the pain long enough, someone will accept you.
Wait your turn, someone will wave you forward.
The friend who says you matter, the love that sees through every cracked layer and still stays will come.
It hurts to say this without cushions, but the hero is not late, the hero is fictional. No stranger will pick up the pieces I drop behind me, no soulmate can upgrade self loathing into security. The life I beg for sits inside a locked room and the key is taped to my own chest.
I still do not know why I like to stay up so late; is it because silence forces me to meet the parts of myself I keep outsourcing, or because in darkness I can keep pretending the rescue is only one more hour away?