My house has always been quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that feels peaceful.
The kind that presses against your chest like it's trying to keep your voice inside you.
My mother worked too much. My father worked even more. They weren't bad people. They just moved through the house like ghosts.
We all did.
Dinner was routine. Small talk. Surface things. Never anything that bled.
So I learned early that feeling too much was… inconvenient.
When I was ten, I scraped my knee on the schoolyard steps. It bled badly. I came home limping, with dirt on my legs and blood on my socks.
My mom barely looked up from her work.
"There's alcohol and bandages in the bathroom."
I nodded and said nothing.
That night, I sat on the edge of the tub and bandaged it myself, biting my lip so I wouldn't make a sound.
That's when I learned:
If it hurts, cover it. If you cry, cry quietly.
But Rose was different.
She was the kind of girl who noticed. Who asked. Who pulled you into the sun and didn't let go, even when you pretended you liked the dark.
I still remember the first time she touched my hand really touched it.
We were twelve. She had snuck into my house through the back door because she hated thunderstorms, and my parents were out. We sat on the floor of my room with the lights off, the window rattling with rain.
I was pretending not to be scared.
She wasn't.
Her fingers brushed mine. She didn't even look at me. She just laced our pinkies together like it was nothing.
But it wasn't nothing.
It was everything.
I didn't sleep that night.
Not because of the storm.
Because I realized I'd never want to let go of that hand again.
Now, years later, I stood in that same house, in the same hallway, staring at the photo frame on the wall a picture of me as a baby in my mother's arms. She was smiling. My dad was, too.
I barely recognized any of us.
That evening, when my mother got home, she paused in the doorway.
"You haven't said much lately."
"I've never said much."
She exhaled. "You're not angry?"
"No."
She waited. "Then what are you?"
I looked at her really looked.
"I'm in love."
She didn't blink. "With that girl. Rose."
"Yes."
A beat passed.
"I just don't want you to make your life harder than it already is."
I nodded. "It might be harder. But it's real."
That silenced her.
Later, when I sat in my room alone, Rose sent me a photo of the sea from her train ride to school. A heart drawn in the fog on the window.
Rose: thinking of you. always.
I didn't reply right away.
I just stared at the photo. And for the first time in years… I let myself cry.
Not because I was hurt.
But because someone in this world in this strange, soft, loud, bright world loved me out loud.
And I finally wanted to be heard.