She learned early that silence
was the safest room in the house –
a place with no doors to slam,
no voices rising like weather.
So she built her life around disappearing.
Not dramatically, not with slammed phones
or final speeches,
but with the soft precision of a match
snuffed between fingers.
People called her calm.
They mistook her quiet for grace,
never noticing how she watched the floor
instead of their eyes,
how she measured every word
as if it might detonate.
When someone asked,
“Yuka, are you okay?”
she smiled the way a curtain smiles
when it hides a broken window.
And when they pressed –
when they reached for the truth
with hands too curious,
too kind —
she vanished.
Ghosting was not cruelty to her.
It was the only language
that never talked back.
A clean severance.
A door that closed itself.
But one day someone didn’t leave.
They waited in the quiet she’d made,
not accusing, not demanding,
just present —
a steady shape in the doorway
she thought she’d locked.
“Yuka,” they said,
not loudly,
but with the kind of voice
that knows what silence costs.
Something in her cracked –
not open,
but sideways,
like a fault line shifting underfoot.
She felt the old instinct rise:
run, vanish,
become the polite nothing
that keeps everyone safe.
But their stillness held her.
Not trapping —
witnessing.
And for the first time
she wondered what she was protecting:
the fragile peace of not being known,
or the deeper fear
that if she spoke,
her voice would betray her
by sounding real.
She didn’t confess.
She didn’t unravel.
She only said,
“I don’t know how to stay.”
It was small,
unfinished,
barely a sentence,
but it was the first thing
she hadn’t had to disappear to say.