Somehow I Still Exist

by Solape Adeyemi

I walk through days that feel already decided, as if every door has been measured and I was found a fraction too small. Compliments arrive like echoes in an empty room, soft, distorted, gone before they touch me. I watch other people move with the ease of belonging, their voices certain, their laughter a language I will never learn.

I keep trying, stitching myself together with effort and apology, but the seams split before night falls. Nothing I build holds. Nothing I offer fills the hollow that keeps widening.

Sometimes I wonder if I was meant to be a draft that no one finished, a faint outline smudged by the wind. The world keeps asking for more, and I am always arriving with less.

And when dusk comes, I stand beneath the skeletal trees, their branches black against a fading sky, and feel myself thinning like the last light, bare, cold, almost nothing, yet somehow I still exist.