The silence has teeth. It nips at my ankles as I sit on a bed that doesn’t creak, in a room where no one knows what my voice sounds like when I’m angry. There is no yelling here. No one forgetting the oven’s on, there are no slammed doors, there are no footsteps that I need to recognise today. I used to dream of this. A room with a door I could close without guilt. A night where no one cried behind walls thin as skin. But now the stillness feels surgical. It feels clean. Cold. Like someone scrubbed the house out of me. Like I came here to be reborn. To start fresh. Cut from the placenta, soap-scrubbed and pale. And maybe I did. Maybe that’s the point. But I can’t stop thinking— What if I miss the noise? What if, one day, I miss the sound of my name being yelled across the kitchen, Even if it meant I had to clean up the mess that followed? — I haven’t unpacked yet. The suitcase glares at me from the corner like it knows something I don’t. Like it knows I’ll be lonely here. Like it knows I’ll text Brother and ask if the house still smells like lavender essential oil and dust. Like it knows I’ll scroll through photos at 2:14am, trying to remember if Mom’s voice ends in a question when she says goodnight. There’s no one to pray for here. No older brother role to play. No weather to read in Dad’s voice. No answers to prepare when Mom barges in my room. No Brother hogging the left side of my bed, asking me if I’ve seen his slippers. Just me. Just me and the click of the fridge, and the hum of a building where no one knows I carry the ghosts of a house too loud to sleep in. And I should be grateful. Shouldn’t I? Isn’t this what everyone said would get better? Isn’t this what growing up was supposed to feel like? A room of one’s own. A calendar with no one else’s meetings plotted in. A future so open it swallows me whole. But I’m terrified. Of becoming someone I don’t recognise. Of liking the solitude too much. Of forgetting the sound of Brother’s laugh when it’s buried under three pillows, trying not to wake me.  Some nights I wonder if I’ll start arguments with strangers just to remember how it felt to be acknowledged. To be the glue. The target. The translator. Something. I keep waiting for the loneliness to feel like peace. But it hasn’t yet. It just feels like waiting. A liminal period, like I’m transitioning. Metamorphosing.  Waiting for someone to break apart the cocoon and pull me out. Half-made wings and all. — M., Some nights, I count my ribs and pretend they’re messages from you. Tap Tap Tap You still there? You say you miss me but the words arrive too fast, and I don’t know if it’s you or the daydream I have of you replying. Your voice sounds different over the phone. Like it’s traveling through something thick and slow, like molasses or memory. I hold the phone like it’s holy, like if I press it hard enough to my ear, I’ll feel your breath on the other side. I miss the way your hair caught the wind in the school parking lot. I miss your sarcasm with its sugar crust. I miss how you looked at me when you thought I wasn’t watching. Now I watch the clock instead, and watch our messages stretch thinner. I don’t know how to love you from here. Not without the soft planes of your hand in mine, not without your perfume clinging to my shirt sleeves, not without the way you say baby when you’re teasing me, or when you mean it when you say my name. There’s so much I don’t tell you. Like how my chest aches when I pass couples holding hands on campus. Or how I almost texted you today to say “I’m coming home” before remembering neither of us knows where that is anymore. - K. — K, Maybe if I close my eyes, I can still hear you breathing beside me, the way you did when we snuck naps in the park at lunch— your head tilted back and legs spread like you trusted the sky. You’d hate it here. It’s too clean. It’s too quiet. Too much fluorescent lighting and not enough orange-hued lamps. I try to describe my dorm to you but it always sounds like a hotel room. I hug my stuffed animals when I sleep. I’m trying to remember the shape of your shoulder under my cheek. I talk to you more in my head than on the phone. Say things I only have words for in my dreams— that I miss your stupid smile when you know you’re being annoying. That I miss your hands and voice when they’re honey-sweet with apology. That I’m scared too. I’m scared that the version of me you love won’t survive the distance. That I’ll become apathetic. That I’ll want to call us off. Sometimes I wish I was selfish. That I’d beg you to come back. That I’d say I hate this, I hate being strong, I hate pretending. But instead you tell me we’ll be okay. And I love and hate you harder for it. - M. — This is all a fantasy. Everything I wrote above— none of it has happened yet. I’m just putting together pieces of a puzzle that I think will help me see something. I don’t know if I’ll miss now. I don’t know if I’ll figure it out. I don’t know if I know anything, really.