Even in the crowd,
I am elsewhere.
Their laughter breaks like surf,
loud and bright,
but it reaches me as a ripple,
a shimmer of sound
already fading before it arrives.
I move among them—
a figure behind glass,
the air thick with echoes
I cannot quite translate.
Each word they toss my way
lands a few feet short,
as if gravity forgets me.
I nod, I smile,
I practice the art of appearing near.
It takes more strength than breathing,
to shape warmth from mimicry,
to hold the right mask steady
while the face beneath it drifts
further out to sea.
There are moments—
fleeting as light on deep water—
when I almost touch their rhythm.
Then it slips away,
and I am again the one
watching fire from behind the fog.
I have learned to build islands
out of small, safe silences.
I decorate them with gestures
that look like belonging,
so no one sees the ocean
between my skin and theirs.
Sometimes I wonder
if remoteness can be a kind of grace—
to see the world from its quiet edge,
to love it from a distance
where it cannot bruise me.
Still,
when the tide goes out
and the noise fades,
the shore is empty,
and I am left
listening for a voice
that sounds like home.
