At night, when the house had gone quiet, she pulled her notebook out from beneath the bed. It wasn't pretty—its cover bent, corners frayed, pages dog-eared—but it was the only place where she could exist without apology. No fake smiles. No forced laughter. No whispers behind her back. Just ink, and the slow rhythm of her hand moving across the page.
She didn't write stories. Not really. She wrote pieces of herself—broken thoughts, scattered fragments. Some lines were sharp with anger, others soft with sadness, most unfinished. She never wrote for anyone to read. She wrote because the silence inside her chest grew too heavy if she didn't let it spill somewhere.
[I don't know who I am when no one's watching.] she scribbled down. [Or maybe I do, and that's the problem. I am the girl who pretends. The girl who smiles when they call her names. The girl who nods along, who eats her lunch in silence, who keeps walking when the world is laughing. If they knew me, really knew me, would it be worse? Or would it be the same? Invisible either way.]
Her handwriting was uneven, the words rushed, messy. She tore at the page with the pen, pressing too hard, as if to make the words mean more, as if the weight of her hand could prove her existence.
When she couldn't write anymore, she drew. Small, strange sketches—dark eyes, shadowy figures, faceless people. Sometimes she drew herself, though never how she looked in the mirror. In her drawings she was blurred, fading, a shape dissolving into the page.
She closed the notebook when the clock ticked past midnight. Staring at it on the blanket, she wondered if she should hide it deeper, bury it somewhere no one would find. If anyone ever opened it, they would see too much. And yet, the thought of no one ever reading it at all—of all her words dying quietly in paper—hurt just as much.
Lying back, she pulled the blanket over her face and let herself breathe in the stale warmth. Tomorrow would come, just like today had, and she would put her mask back on, and no one would know.
But here, alone, she could admit the truth: she was tired. So unbearably tired of being.