Words delivered with kindness and love, were received as critique. Yet she did not know why. She was surrounded by family that proclaimed that they loved her, that she was fine and nothing was wrong – yet she somehow knew they lied. Their eyes, their movements and voices were alien to her, and she wondered why. She looked like them, acted like them, and sounded like them – and still she felt so distant from them that she might as well be a different species.
Maybe it was the denial. The words they used when she voiced her worries. They just pointed out that everyone felt like that. That she could not know that she was different, for how could she know what everyone else felt? It was true. She didn’t know. She just knew that she wasn’t meant to be what she was. She wasn’t meant to be what they claimed she was.

Over the years she practiced. She tried to find the right words to say that didn’t elicit any unwanted responses, a look or a tremble of a hand. Words that didn’t make them laugh or cry. Words that she learned were the same as staying silent. She grew distant in her mind, creating worlds between them and herself. She didn’t feel like she belonged anywhere, so it was easy to create her own peace.
Thoughts of leaving had grown with her, yet she suffocated that need every day, until she was simply compliant and observant. She watched them, noted how their voices changed in different circumstances. Noted what stressed them, and in turn what stressed her. She kept her words. Kept her peace. Knowing that they would rebuke any claims of how she saw the world, and how it was not the world they made.

As she learned to traverse this strange world, learned what people wanted and what they thought, she grew colder. She didn’t see the point in their rituals or words. Didn’t understand why she should. They told her, what was expected of her, but she just smiled and went on her way.
She never learned what other people felt, if they felt the same. She never understood why they believed in the life of a world that was dying. She learned how to fake those thoughts. She even tricked herself from time to time. What she learned was what she was – and she learned that it didn’t matter what they thought. It only mattered what she thought of herself. Their world would never be hers, and she would forever dream of a day where she could take flight and find the world she was meant to be in.

The world she dreamt of was locked in her mind. A paradise of peace, of starlight and burning passion. A world of quiet notes of tranquility and happiness, that she only glimpsed in moments. She saw the stars, saw the infinite possibilities, and yet, her wings stayed broken. But she would never give up. The doubts that lingered throughout her life pushed her forward. The skepsis that met her in the eyes of her family carried her, and her will and imagination brought her so close – but would it ever be close enough? That question could only be answered in her dreams.