The world doesn't want me

The world doesn’t want me— I feel it in the spaces between words, in the rooms that fall silent when I enter, in the way their eyes cut through me, sharp and indifferent. I exist like an echo no one listens for, a presence only ever tolerated, never embraced. They laugh like glass shattering, pointing fingers dipped in poison, whispering daggers into my skin. I hear them, I hear them… I hear them. The boys say my body takes up too much space, as if my skin was never mine to begin with, as if I should shrink into something softer, smaller, unseen. The girls look at me like a wound that refuses to close, a thing to be pitied, or worse—ignored. And my friends— God, my friends. They don’t feel like friends anymore. They feel like hands reaching, pulling, taking, and I give and I give and I give, until my ribs are hollow, my soul threadbare. But when I need, when I break, when I fall— there is nothing but the sound of my own breathing, ragged and lonely. I am so tired. Tired of searching for warmth in a world made of ice, tired of running when there is nowhere left to go. I used to love the game, the sound of the ball on the court, I used to think my feet belonged there. But I stumble now, hands grasping for something solid, and all I find is the weight of failure pressing against my chest. So tell me— what do you do when the things that made you feel alive become the things that remind you you’re not? The world doesn’t want me, so I press my back against the wall, trying to disappear into the paint. But I am still here, still breathing, whether they want me or not. Whether I want it, or not.