It's strange how a house can be full of people and still feel colder than an empty room.
Aarya sat on the edge of her bed, back straight, knees folded, trying not to listen. The ceiling fan above clicked with every rotation, as if counting the seconds of her silence. From the living room came her father's voice, harsh and loud. Her mother's retorts followed, equal in volume but breaking around the edges, like glass forced into steel.
It had become a routine now—the yelling, the blame, the bitterness that hung in the air long after the words had stopped. Their home was a battlefield of old regrets and fresh wounds, and Aarya had long stopped trying to play the peacemaker. No one wanted peace. They just wanted to win.
She picked up a pen and underlined a sentence in her physics textbook, pretending to study. It didn't matter what she underlined; she wouldn't remember it. The ink on the page was just a way to drown out the noise.
Nobody ever asked her how she was doing. Not her parents, not her teachers, not her classmates. They saw her marks, her neat handwriting, her quiet demeanor, and assumed she was fine. A good student. A good daughter. A good girl. As if being quiet was a sign of peace and not a symptom of exhaustion.
Aarya turned to the next page, then to the next, her eyes scanning over diagrams and equations that blurred into meaningless shapes. Her thoughts drifted, as they often did, to a place she had no name for. A place where the air was light and her heart didn't feel like a burden. Where her voice mattered. Where her silence wasn't mistaken for consent.
She looked at the clock. 8:43 PM. Dinner time. She already knew how it would go. Her father would eat first, in silence or in anger. Her mother would eat later, after sulking in the kitchen. Aarya would take her plate to her room, quietly, and eat with the door shut, pretending the food didn't taste like tension.
She stood up and walked to the small desk by the window. Her notebook lay open, untouched since morning. She flipped to a blank page. For a moment, she just stared at it.
Then she wrote:
"I don't want to be invisible anymore."
It wasn't a declaration. Not yet. Just a whisper. But it was a start
---
In school, she was the girl in the second row, always present, always quiet. She answered when asked, scored well in tests, and stayed out of trouble. Her teachers liked her. Her classmates tolerated her. But no one really knew her.
Not that she blamed them. It was easier that way. Safer. If people didn't know you, they couldn't hurt you. If they didn't ask questions, you didn't have to lie.
But some days, she ached to be known. Not admired. Not envied. Just... seen. To have someone look at her and ask, "Are you okay?" and mean it. To have someone notice the crack in her voice, the way she flinched at loud sounds, the way she smiled with her lips but not her eyes.
Her only escape was her journal. In its pages, she could scream without making a sound. Cry without anyone noticing. Dream without judgment. It was the only place where her voice was loud enough to matter.
---
That evening, while walking home from school, Aarya paused at the public library near the main market. It was an old building with rusted gates and cracked stone steps, but inside, it smelled like stories and secrets. She had been coming here for years, finding solace in books that felt more real than people.
She headed straight to the back corner, where the poetry books lived. Most were untouched, their pages stiff with neglect. She ran her fingers along the spines until she found her favorite—an old collection by a writer whose name she couldn't pronounce but whose words felt like hers.
She sat down on the floor and flipped to a dog-eared page. Her eyes scanned the poem:
"She spoke not a word, yet the sky heard her grief. She cried without tears, yet the earth felt her pain. She lived like a shadow, soft and unseen. But the stars whispered her name, again and again."
A lump rose in her throat. She didn't know why she came back to this one, again and again. Maybe because it reminded her that even silence could be heard by someone. Somewhere.
---
Back home, the night was quiet. Too quiet. The kind that comes only after a storm.
Her father was asleep on the couch. The TV was still on, casting flickering shadows on the wall. Her mother was in the kitchen, wiping the counter with slow, tired hands. Aarya walked past them both, plate in hand, heart heavy.
In her room, she didn't eat. She opened her window instead. The air was cooler now, tinged with the scent of night jasmine from the neighbor's garden. The sky stretched above her, endless and dark.
She thought about dreams. She didn't know what hers was yet. Was it to be a writer? An artist? A doctor? Or just... free?
All she knew was that she wanted something to be hers. Something untouched by the chaos around her. A place, a purpose, a person. Something that made her feel alive.
She picked up her notebook again and wrote:
"I don't know who I am yet. But I'm going to find out. And when I do, I'll never apologize for it."
She signed it with a small star.
---
That night, Aarya didn't cry. For the first time in weeks, she didn't feel like she was drowning. There was no sudden change. No miracle. Just a quiet shift inside her. A flicker. A whisper.
A wing, perhaps.
She wasn't flying yet.
But she had started to believe that maybe, someday, she could.
And that belief, small and fragile as it was, was enough.
For now.
Maybe one day, someone will read my words and understand the kind of quiet that isn't peace but survival... maybe—"
Just then, her window slammed shut with a loud, dramatic BANG.
She jumped, nearly flinging her notebook across the room.
A pigeon—confused, possibly rebellious—had attempted a graceful landing on her window grill and failed miserably, crashing into the glass like a feathery missile.
"Seriously?" she muttered, scrambling to check if the bird was alive (it was, though it looked offended).