False Safety
There’s a house that stands beautifully effortless and at the edge of crumbling — its windows glazed in golden light, its doors always slightly open, offering, pleading.
She wandered there one dusk — a will that felt forced.
The ground had thinned beneath her feet for years. Praise, silence, envy, hunger. The world around her didn’t see, so she stepped inside.
Inside, it was always almost everything.
The walls bent themselves to her desires. Her reflection smiled back just the right amount. Her voice came out cleaner, softer, more listenable. Every mirror was kind. Every meal disappeared without judgment. Every version of her was better than the last.
It felt like an endless dream.
But at some point we desire to wake up.
She tried to leave once. Tried to remember her mother’s laugh, her real laugh — not the tight one she used when she didn’t really understand. She tried to remember herself without the walls.
But the house wouldn’t let her
She was given a room with fake windows and no clocks. Time didn’t pass, but somehow she aged. Her thoughts became rehearsed and any difference faded from her. Soon she walked with no clear purpose.
And in the quietest corners of the house, she met the others. Girls like her. Smiling faintly. Eyes with no depth. Voices with no intent.
They didn’t speak of before. Maybe they’d forgotten. Maybe they’d given up. Maybe it had been sewn out of them, stitch by invisible stitch.
They moved like flowers pressed in books. Beautiful. Silent. Flattened. Dead.
She asked one of them, once, “How did you get here?” And the girl didn’t answer. She just smiled with lips that didn’t move and eyes that didn’t blink and a sorrow so still it looked like peace.
That night, the girl dreamt of real windows. Not a perfect world — but a real one. A meaningful one. Where people looked with love and hope and rightful anger.
And when she woke, she knew: The house did not love her. It only loved her as long as she stayed quietly in place. So she burned her way out.
She ran through memory, through anger, through every “almost” she had ever clung to. She ran until her voice returned hoarse and honest. Until the stars felt real, and not embroidered onto some velvet sky.
She didn’t look back.
But some nights, she still feels the pull — the perfume of praise, the idea of false gold that shines just as bright.
She answers it with peace now. And somewhere, in the house that still stands, is a girl that remembers her name
