A Thousand Silent Screams

Chapter 2: The Unseen Battle

I was sixteen when the world started to dim around the edges. Not suddenly, not all at once, but in slow, barely noticeable ways—like how twilight slips in so gently you don’t realize the sun is gone until darkness sits with you. I didn’t understand what was happening at first. I just knew that everything that once stirred something inside me—music, laughter, the smell of rain on hot concrete—started to feel… dull. Blurred. As if someone had placed a sheet of glass between me and the world.

My name still rang through morning roll calls, my hands still turned the pages of textbooks, and my mouth still curved into a polite smile when required. To anyone else, I was present. Functioning. But inside, I was fading. Emotionally dissolving, quietly unraveling beneath the weight of days that passed without meaning.

I don’t remember exactly when I started hiding parts of myself. Maybe it began the first time someone told me to “stop being so sensitive,” as if my feelings were an inconvenience to the world. Or maybe it was when I tried to speak up in class and someone laughed before I could finish. Little things. Quiet moments. But they collected inside me like dust, slowly suffocating the person I once was.

By sixteen, I had perfected the art of blending in. I wasn’t popular, but I wasn’t invisible either—just the right amount of forgettable to avoid attention. I wore plain clothes, tied my hair the same way every day, and carried the same dull brown backpack whose zipper I had fixed twice myself. I existed in the background, like a hallway light people forgot to turn off. Always there, but unnoticed.

School was more of a stage than a place of learning. Every hallway, every classroom had its roles assigned. The loud girls who owned the room. The athletes who swaggered with a confidence I could never mimic. The loners who didn’t care and made that known. And then there was me—a shapeshifter. Someone who learned to mirror the expressions of others, to nod at the right times, to suppress the urge to scream when the silence inside grew too loud.

Most of my classmates were busy becoming something. Someone. I watched them plan their futures like people choosing outfits—casually, confidently. Medical school. Engineering. Moving abroad. Falling in love. They wore ambition like a second skin, while I wore confusion like a winter coat I couldn’t take off.

At home, I was no different. My parents weren’t cruel—they were just tired. My mother, overworked and forever comparing me to the daughters of her friends. My father, distant and preoccupied with bills and burdens he never spoke about but wore in the heaviness of his sighs. I didn’t fit into their dreams, and over time, I stopped trying to. Meals were silent. Affection was awkward. And love felt more like obligation than warmth.

But I had one place where I could be real—my diary.

It wasn’t fancy, just a worn-out leather journal stitched by my mother years ago when she still had time for hobbies. The pages were yellowed, the edges curled, and the spine slightly torn. But it was mine. My refuge. My confession box. My best friend.

I would fill page after page with the words I couldn’t say out loud. Some days, they poured out of me like a flood—angry, aching, desperate. Other days, they came in fragments. A single sentence. A question. A word that had haunted me all day like a whisper I couldn’t unhear.

Why?

What if?

Please.

Enough.

The pages knew everything. About the boy I liked but couldn’t speak to. About the girl I hated because she reminded me of everything I wasn’t. About the nights I cried into my pillow until my chest ached from the effort of silence. And about the aching emptiness that settled in my chest, like a second heartbeat made of sorrow.

There was one place where I truly breathed—a forgotten corner of the school rooftop.

The door to it wasn’t locked, just overlooked. The janitor probably assumed no one cared for a space that held only broken bricks and bird droppings. But to me, it was sacred. A place untouched by teenage cruelty or adult expectations. It was there, on that rough cement floor under a cracked sky, that I met myself.

I would sneak away during lunch or in the gaps between classes, diary clutched to my chest like a lifeline. I’d sit on the ledge, feeling the wind slap my face as if to remind me that I was still alive. The distant honking of cars, the indistinct murmur of life below—it all sounded different from up there. Softer. Further away. Like the world had pressed pause for a moment just for me.

I’d write there, often until my fingers cramped or the bell forced me back into the corridors I loathed. I wrote poems, letters, stories I never finished. I wrote letters to God, asking questions I didn’t expect answers to. Letters to boys who didn’t know I existed. Letters to my future self, begging her to hold on. To not forget this version of me, even if it hurt.

.

And sometimes, when the sadness grew too loud, I wrote letters to death.

Not because I wanted to die. Not really. Not yet. But because it felt like the only thing that might understand me. Death didn’t ask questions. It didn’t mock. It didn’t expect me to smile when I wanted to scream. It just listened—cold, silent, steady. And sometimes, that was all I needed.