Walking away from a question before asking it is equivalent to passing judgment on one's own fate, proving that when we choose safety over possibility, we become the primary authors of our own disappointment.
You swallow the words before they reach your tongue, a quiet surrender disguised as patience. You let the silence settle in the room, assuming it was meant to be there all along. The door stays shut because you never reached for the handle. You convince yourself it’s locked, standing on the threshold, building a wall out of everything you refused to say. It feels safer to stay still than to risk a falling out, so you accept the outcome you constructed in your head— a shadow box of scenarios where you always lose, crafted entirely by your own doubt. To turn away without speaking is to sign off on the verdict yourself. You hand over your agency to hesitation and call it bad luck. The distance between what is real and what might have been is just the silence you chose to keep, a line you drew and never crossed. In the end, the world only gives you the exact emptiness you handed it, leaving you to wonder if the answer was always no, or if you just made it so.
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