There is a particular kind of contrition
you develop
without having done anything wrong
a learned smallness,
the body folding inward
at the first sign
of someone else's discomfort.
You become fluent in periphery.
You read exits before you read faces.
You calibrate your presence
against the room's tolerance
and find yourself
always, slightly,
over the limit.
It isn't grief they flinch from.
It's the inconvenience of witnessing it
the way sorrow, unresolved,
makes people feel
implicated
in something they didn't cause
and cannot fix.
So they don't.
And you sit with the strange indignity
of being a burden
simply by existing
in the aftermath of something
that happened to you.