Static Words
The world outside was a blur of gray. Rain whispered against the windows of Elara’s room, soft and persistent, like a secret she wasn’t supposed to know. She sat cross-legged on her bed, arms wrapped tightly around her knees, eyes trained on the tiny rivers streaming down the glass. She told herself she liked the rain—at least it made the sky match what she felt inside.
Most days, her feelings came out wrong. She’d open her mouth, trying to explain the mess inside her chest, but the words tumbled out in mismatched lines. Sentences that meant nothing. Sentences that meant everything.
“Do you ever feel like your heart is made of smoke?” she once asked her mom.
Her mom had barely looked up from her phone. “What are you even talking about?”
And that was the end of it.
That was always the end of it.
In the chaos of her household—two screaming little siblings, her mom’s tired footsteps always rushing past, and the lingering tension of a father who had left long before her memory could hold him—Elara learned how to shrink. Not physically, but emotionally. She became small in a room. A soft background noise.
But inside, she was loud.
She was thunder.
A scream trapped in glass.
The sound of laughter came from downstairs. Not hers. Never hers.
It was her siblings—Liam and Zoe—laughing at a cartoon, their high-pitched giggles clashing with the storm outside. It wasn’t that she hated them. But they had something she didn’t: permission to be loud, to cry, to demand attention and get it. When they were upset, their mother comforted them. When Elara was upset, her mother grew colder.
“You’re too sensitive,” she’d say.
Or worse: “You’re too much.”
And Elara would nod and smile like she understood, like she agreed. Because fighting back only made things worse. And crying? That was ammunition. It made her “dramatic,” “needy,” “ungrateful.”
She wasn’t ungrateful. She was just… tired. Tired of trying to decode herself in words that nobody ever wanted to understand.
At school, people told her she was lucky. That she had a good head on her shoulders. That she was “put together.”
If only they knew.
They didn’t see the nights she stared at the ceiling for hours, wondering if anything she said or did even mattered. They didn’t hear the sobs she bit back into her pillow. They didn’t see the pages she filled with poems she never let anyone read.
“I am a house with no windows,
painted bright from the outside.
But inside, there’s only dust,
and echoes of things I never said.”
On the surface, Elara was the kind of girl teachers adored—quiet, smart, organized. She sat at the front of every class, raised her hand when she knew the answer, nodded even when she didn’t. Her notebooks were neat, her grades high.
But underneath that, she was unraveling.
Sometimes, when the loneliness got too sharp, she’d scribble words on her arm in invisible ink. Just letters pressed into skin—not hard enough to bruise, but deep enough to feel something. Just enough to remind herself that she was still real.
“Elara, can you help with your brother’s homework?” her mom called from downstairs.
Elara blinked at the window, breaking from her thoughts. Her chest sank a little more. She stood up slowly, tucking her journal beneath her pillow as if it were something sacred. Something shameful.
In the kitchen, the light was harsh—white and sterile. The kind of light that made everything feel colder.
Liam sat at the table, slouching, chewing the end of a pencil. He looked up at her with a mischievous grin.
“Mom says you’re the smart one. But I bet I’m still better at math.”
Elara sat across from him, biting back the irritation that rose in her throat.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “Let’s see how good you are, then.”
Their mom passed behind her, setting a pot on the stove. She didn’t say thanks. Didn’t smile. Just moved past her like a shadow.
Later that night, after dinner was over and dishes had been thrown together in the sink, Elara lay in her bed staring at the ceiling again. Her chest felt too heavy for her body. There was a scream caught behind her ribs, but she didn’t know how to let it out.
She tried. She did.
She had even written a note once. Folded it carefully and slid it into her mother’s purse.
It said:
“I don’t think I’m okay. Can we talk?”
The note disappeared, and nothing ever came of it. Not even a glance.
So Elara stopped asking.
“They say to speak up,
but when I do,
they say it’s the wrong time,
the wrong tone,
the wrong me.”
The next morning, Elara forced herself out of bed the same way she always did: pretending someone was watching.
She imagined a camera in the corner of the room, or a ghost maybe, silently witnessing her every move. It helped her act like she had a reason. She pulled on her school uniform like armor—wrinkled skirt, oversized hoodie, and the same shoes she’d outgrown last year but still wore because “we can’t waste money on shoes just for looks.”
Downstairs, the house buzzed with chaos.
Zoe was crying because she didn’t want cereal. Liam had spilled milk on the floor and was laughing about it. Their mom stood at the kitchen counter, running on two hours of sleep and three cups of instant coffee.
Elara walked in and opened her mouth to say Good morning, but the words dissolved the second her mother turned and said sharply:
“Don’t just stand there—can you help? You’re not a guest here.”
Elara’s chest pinched. “I was going to help.”
Her mom just rolled her eyes. “Always with that tone. You talk back more than anyone in this house.”
She wasn’t even talking back.
She took Zoe’s bowl, wiped the milk off the counter, put toast in the toaster, and didn’t say another word. She didn’t expect a “thank you.” She didn’t even want one anymore. Just silence would’ve been nice.
On the bus, Elara sat in the third row near the window, her headphones in with no music playing—just static silence so no one would talk to her. She stared out at the gray drizzle painting the glass again, fog collecting in little patches she wiped away with her sleeve.
She saw her reflection: tired eyes, lips pressed together so tightly it almost hurt. She tried to smile at herself. The result was haunting.
At school, she was someone else.
Not happier. Just hollowed-out and polished.
“Hey Elara!”
“Loved your poem in English!”
“Are you going to join the art club this semester?”
She nodded and smiled, always smiling. Always performing.
Her teachers praised her as “gifted” and “quietly brilliant.” They had no idea she was hanging on by threads too thin to see.
At lunch, she sat under the big tree near the back field, notebook open on her lap. Not to do homework—but to write what she couldn’t say.
“I wish I had a friend who could read my silence.
Someone who’d hear the parts I don’t know how to speak.
Someone who’d sit with me on days I don’t exist.”
The page blurred.
She blinked fast and wiped her eyes with her sleeve again. No one could see her cry here. Not at school. She had to hold the pieces together, or everyone would see the cracks.
That night, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror for too long.
She looked at herself and wondered, quietly, if anyone would miss her if she disappeared.
Her reflection didn’t answer.
She sat on the floor of the bathroom, heart racing, thoughts spinning fast and sharp like blades. She didn’t want to die. But sometimes, she didn’t want to exist either.
She took the small box cutter from the bathroom drawer—the one used to open stubborn toothpaste seals or stray packaging. Her hands trembled. She stared at the metal.
And then she dropped it. It clattered against the tile like a scream.
She couldn’t do it.
She backed into the corner, wrapped her arms around her knees again, and sobbed. For minutes, maybe hours.
Eventually, she locked herself in her room, shut the lights, curled under her blanket, and cried until her pillow was soaked and her throat ached.
“I am not brave.
I am not strong.
I’m just still here.
And I don’t know why.”
TO BE CONTINUED…
