Zebra Seeking Spoons

The world moves in circles I can’t follow.

Friends gather in doorways of laughter,

their voices braided with plans

I can no longer keep.

I sit in a quiet room

where pain hums like an old machine,

a low and constant electricity

that no one else can hear.

The phone vibrates with distant lives—

I smile at the screen,

but my body stays anchored

to the heavy silence of this bed.

Loneliness grows long shadows,

stretching across the floor,

pressing against the windows

where the sun still dares to shine.

I ache not only in bones and muscles,

but in the spaces between them—

in the hollow where belonging once lived,

in the breath that longs

to join the chorus outside my door.

Here, isolation wears my name,

softly, endlessly,

until even I forget

the sound of my own voice.