The Shape of a Room

A return to writing

It is quiet when I return to writing. Not the kind of silence that soothes, but the kind that makes you aware of your own breathing, of the way your fingers hesitate over the keys. The space I left behind is still here, waiting, but I no longer fit into it the way I once did. The walls feel closer or maybe further away. The chair is the same, the desk unchanged, but something is different. Perhaps it is me.

I had forgotten how writing rearranges a person. How it is both a retreat and a reaching out, a way of carving space where there is none. I came back to it in search of something—structure, direction, a tether—but what I found was loneliness. Not just my own, but the loneliness inherent in the act itself. Writing is sitting in a room and talking to no one, hoping someone will listen later. It is making a shape out of absence, trying to hold onto something that is already slipping through your hands.

Still, I stay. I write through the quiet, through the discomfort. I write about vanishing, about coming back, about how a person finds their place again after feeling lost for so long. The words don’t come easily, but they come. And maybe that is enough for now.

Maybe that is all writing has ever been—a way of pressing against loneliness, of making something solid out of the shifting spaces inside us. A way of saying: I am here. I am here. I am here.