Disconnected, lost frequencies.

It’s been over two weeks since I’ve written. That wasn’t intentional, I wanted to write regularly. There’s a silence growing inside me again - not the peaceful kind, not the sort that feels like rest - but a heavy, echoing silence. Like walking through a house long abandoned, where even your own footsteps sound foreign. I can feel it settling in my chest, in the hollow between my ribs. A quiet so loud it hums against my bones. I can’t explain it, but it’s there - gnawing, whispering, pulling at the thin strings that once tethered me to the world outside my own skin.

Lately, I feel like a radio stuck between stations - all static, no song. It feels like I’m living behind glass. I can see everyone, hear the soft murmur of conversations, laughter in the distance, the buzz of everyday life carrying on - but I can’t reach them. I knock, gently at first, then harder, desperate for some small crack to form, but the glass holds. Untouched. Unbroken. I press my palms to it, searching for warmth on the other side, but all I feel is cold. It's like I'm haunting a life that used to be mine. Silence is so loud. This silence has teeth. It gnaws at the edges of my spirit until everything I once found easy - laughing, loving, answering that damn phone - feels like threading a needle underwater.

Phone calls come and go - the screen lights up with a name, a voice I used to reach for without hesitation - and yet, I let it ring. Each unanswered call feels like another tiny betrayal, a thread snapping loose. Messages pile up like fallen leaves and with each one I don't return, the guilt grows sharper, heavier, until it feels like wearing armor made of regret, stitched together with apologies I’ll never actually send. 

I know this feeling. It’s an old visitor. Familiar as the way darkness stretches across a winter afternoon, swallowing the light before you even notice it's gone. I know this terrain too well - this strange, shadowed country where my own mind turns against me, whispering that I’m better off alone, that nobody really notices the silence anyway. It's a cruel sort of familiarity, like returning to a house you once fled from during a hurricane but still carry the key to despite it being destroyed. I keep thinking if I stay silent long enough, the feeling will pass. That maybe if I just "wait it out”, I’ll wake up one morning and the static will clear, and I'll hear the music again. I can feel it circling again, though, stealthy and patient, waiting for me to stop pretending I can outrun it.
It’s not that I don’t care. I care so much it almost burns. It's just... the tether between me and the world feels frayed and fragile, like a spider's web left out in a storm. Each time I try to move toward someone, it feels like the strands snap one by one, leaving me flailing, suspended in a space that is both too much and never enough. I don't know how to fight it anymore. I don't know where the door is, or if there even is one. I just know that the longer I stay silent, the harder it is to ultimately find my way back.

It's like trying to hold water in my hands - every time I think I’ve grasped something solid, something good, it slips through my fingers. Friendships, laughter, connection - all just glimmers off the broken web, dissolving before I can even close my fist. And I’m left staring at my empty palms, wondering what I did wrong- what I keep doing wrong. 

I write letters I’ll never send. I draft apologies in my mind to people who don’t even know they’re owed one. I rehearse conversations I'll never have, practicing words that feel too fragile to speak aloud. It’s like building bridges out of smoke, beautiful but destined to disappear the moment I step towards them.

I’m tired. Tired in a way sleep will never fix. Tired in a way that makes even the simplest things - answering a text, opening a window, stepping outside - feel like climbing uphill with no end in sight. I am terrified of slipping too far under again, of becoming someone unreachable. Some days, I wonder if anyone would even notice if I just... faded. Other days, I know they would - and somehow that knowing hurts even more. Because it means I am the one cutting the lines, isolating myself in the very moments when I most desperately need to be held together.

There’s a cruel sort of poetry in it - this slow, invisible unraveling. I am both the one drowning and the one letting go of the rope. I am both the ghost and the haunted. Still, part of me hopes. Part of me clutches fiercely to the idea that maybe, just maybe, if I keep writing it down, if I keep carving these feelings into words, I can build a bridge back to myself. I write in the dark, sending up flares that no one else can see, hoping that somehow the act itself is a kind of tether. A way back to the world… a way back to me.

Some stubborn, aching part of me refuses to let go. Some part of me, buried under all the numbness and noise, keeps whispering: Write. Even if no one reads it. Even if the words feel hollow. Even if your hands are shaking.

Because maybe this is the only way I know how to keep breathing - to leave a trail of words like breadcrumbs, hoping someday they’ll lead me back to myself, like a folklore. For now, all I can do is sit in the quiet, press my hand against the glass, and promise myself that even if the world feels unreachable, I am still here. I am still trying. 

Somewhere deep inside, even in the static, I am still listening for the song. And maybe that is enough, to still want to hear it. I refuse to give in to this silence, I’ll never allow it to fully engulf me. 

Author’s Note:
Originally written 10-18-2024: when the weight of being seen felt heavier than the loneliness.

This is a more recent one. It wasn’t written from a beautiful place of reflection; it was written from inside the wreckage. From inside the silence that doesn’t soothe, the kind that claws at you from the inside out. I used to think I had to wait until I healed to share. That the only stories worth telling were the ones with neat endings and hopeful lessons. But I’ve started to see the beauty in sharing from the middle - when the wound is still open, when the voice still shakes - because sometimes that’s where the most honest stories live.

I didn’t write this because I had something wise to say. I wrote it because I was disappearing, and this was the only way I knew how to leave a trace. A flare in the dark. Proof I was still here.

There’s something terrifying about being a witness to your own unraveling. About saying, “This is me, mid-collapse,” and hoping someone out there will see the shape of their own ache in your words. But I think that’s how we survive- by letting the silence speak, and by meeting each other in it.

If you’re in the thick of it, too - lost, tired, unsure if you’re still reachable - this one is for you. You’re not too far gone. You’re not too much. You’re not alone in the deafening silence.

And neither am I.