All that is written here is nothing more than an outlet for feeling, not for recognition, not for remembrance, nor for judgment. It is born from a space dark and suffocating, from chambers of silence that have never known a window. A feeling that once could only be interred, like a prisoner in an eternal cell, eroded by time yet never touched by light. A feeling that, for years, transformed into the walls, the floor, and the ceiling of my own prison. Within that prison, I was both captive and executioner, victim and judge.

But tonight, upon this paper, I let it out. Not in escape, for escape is an admission that we are still pursued. I let it walk slowly across these letters, touching the soil it has only heard through the cracks in the walls. I write not so that this feeling might die, for such feelings never truly perish. They merely slumber, then stir, then slumber again in an unending cycle. I write so that it may breathe, so that it may have space, so that it may cease to be the specter haunting the corridors of my mind each night.

I have known this feeling for a long time, before I ever had a name for it. It arrived not as a guest, but as a permanent resident who refused to be evicted. It grew alongside me, creeping into every pore, coursing through the blood that pumps life into this body. Once I tried to bury it deep, to smother it with labor, with counterfeit laughter, with crowds that only made me more desolate. I thought that if I were busy and exhausted enough, it would forget its way home. But this feeling is more cunning than I. It knows every hidden passage. It breaches every fortress, slithering through invisible fractures, and always, always it returns.

The prison I speak of is not of stone or iron. It is fashioned from silence, from words arrested at the tip of the tongue, from sobs swallowed back into the throat, from questions I never dared to voice for fear their answers would shatter my remaining hope.