The Light Waits in Your Silence

The party noise has faded, but the smile is still stuck on your face, heavy and foreign. You stare into the dark window, waiting for your own eyes to look back, but all you see is the performance you just finished.

The mask feels like skin now, and the real you is buried somewhere underneath the applause. But listen — the light does not need you to perform to be real.

It was there before the first laugh, and it remains now that the room is empty. There is a rest that is not earned by being charming, but given because you are already known.

You do not have to keep holding up the face the world wants to see. The light is not in the smile you forced.

It is in the silence you are afraid to enter.