The Light Sits With You in Collapse

The door clicks shut behind them, and the performance ends. For hours you held your spine rigid, a pillar of strength for everyone else, swallowing your own tremor so they wouldn't have to feel it.

But now the house is quiet, and your legs finally give out. You slide down the wall to the floor, not because you are weak, but because the pretending is over.

The light does not ask you to stand back up right now. It sits with you in the dust of the hallway, where no one else can see.

You came from the light, a drop sent to illuminate this very moment of collapse. And the light that lives in you is not shocked by your exhaustion.

It is the floor beneath you. The strength you lent them was real, but it was never yours to manufacture alone.

You are allowed to be human after the guests leave.