#peripheral
I am never the first choice.
No one aches
to share secrets with me.
They guard their words around me,
scrolling past my name,
only turning to me
when no one else replies.
Secrets lie heavy,
pressing against my ribs,
ready to be known
if they’d listen.
I don’t want their pity;
I just want to be heard.
Slowly, I become
more like a memory.
Not forgotten—
but no one notices I’m missing.
My absence isn’t felt.
No one traces the shape I leave.
Sometimes
on the edge of the circle
I’ll look away for a moment,
study the sky,
count cracks in pavement.
Once in a while, there’s mercy
in a stranger.
They might smile at me.
A slight curve,
nothing more.
But
I’ll remember I exist
and for a heartbeat… I’ll matter.
Feb 13
Feb 13, 2026 at 1:32 PM UTC
I still see you there, in the peripheral of life—
months or years stretched between each stolen glance,
a face that hasn't changed in my memory
the way I know it must have changed in mirrors.
And I'm self-aware enough to recognize
this ache isn't really about you anymore.
It's about the version of me who knew you,
who stood at a crossroads
and chose the empty road.
We shared so much then—
stages and stories, all those common tongues
of theater and tale, music and meaning.
So many bridges between us,
and I didn't know which one to cross.
You, with your structures and careful chapters.
Me, fighting for a freedom
I never learned to hold.
Two storytellers on diverging paths,
and the greatest tragedy isn't the distance—
it's that we never wrote
the one story that could have mattered.
Ours.
I don't know who you are now.
I'm honest enough to admit
we likely wouldn't work,
that what I've preserved
has more to do with what I lack
than who you ever were.
But here's the wound that won't close:
I believed then—still believe,
in my most desperate hours—
that sharing life with someone,
truly sharing the weight and wonder both,
is the only path to happiness
that means anything at all.
And I am so alone.
I don't share love with my family.
Barely with my friends.
Just this hollow, echoless space
where connection should be,
and the knowledge that I had a chance—
maybe my only chance—
at the kind of love that might have filled it.
I let it pass.
Now I see you in the peripheral,
living a life I'm not part of,
and what breaks me isn't losing you
but the adventures we'll never write,
the story I'll never get to read—
the one where two storytellers
chose the same path
and I wasn't so alone.
It's too late now.
It was probably always going to be too late.
But I return to this anyway—
the ghost of what I didn't choose,
the belief that I answered wrong
on the only question that ever mattered,
and there are no revisions.
Just the peripheral.
Just the years between glances.
Just this.
Nov 8, 2025
Nov 8, 2025 at 10:39 PM UTC
When my innocent eyes meets a strangers eyes for some time,
then breaks off,
I've learned I don't have to move my body during the break.
Just my eyes, opening up peripheral.
King of his sphere
Jun 3, 2015
Jun 3, 2015 at 12:34 AM UTC