i used to think the truth was a gift,
something to be shared like a warm crust,
but now i am swallowing it whole
just to keep it out of their teeth.
i am a vault made of sugar and static.
i am watching my friends walk into the wind,
unaware that their shadows have been sold
to a house with the porch light on
and a finger hovering over a contact name.
i am swallowed by a sudden, jagged nausea—
not the kind from a spinning ride,
but the kind that comes when you realize
the floorboards have ears
and the walls have been practicing their shorthand.
we thought we were whispering into a well,
dropping our secrets like heavy coins
and waiting for the splash of silence.
but the well has a second mouth.
it’s funneling the echoes upward,
into the bright, sterile kitchens of people
who trade our private deaths like recipes.
i watch the phone lines hum.
they look like grey ribbons of smoke,
carrying the weight of a name, a truth, a "did you hear?"
until it lands in a living room three miles away—
a hand grenade wrapped in a "concern."
it is a specific kind of violence:
to take someone’s raw, unpeeled heart
and hand it to someone who wasn't invited to the table.
to turn a confession into a phone call,
to out the light in someone’s eyes
before they were ready to let the sun hit it.
i feel the paranoia crawling under my skin
like a thousand tiny, frantic insects.
who is the ghost at our table?
who is the one holding the scissors,
not for safekeeping,
but to snip the threads of our safety?
i am white-knuckling their secrets now,
tucking them into the blue parts of me.
because out here, the air is no longer private.
the world is a giant mouth,
and today, it is chewing on the people i love
just to see if they taste like a tragedy.