There’s a moment in adulthood
when silence weighs like lead,
a moment when the ground beneath
feels too solid to stand on.
You’re grown, you’ve learned to hide
your fear behind a confident smile,
but this—this is different.

The email arrives.
The subject line alone
is a warning,
and you already know.
Your palms sweat before you open it,
eyes flicking from the screen to the clock
as if time will somehow save you.
It doesn’t. It never does.

There it is: the dreaded number.
The digits don’t lie,
they don’t care that you worked overtime,
that you stayed up late rewriting,
that you fought for every inch of this.
The number stares back at you
like the cold, disapproving eyes of a parent
whose love you’ve outgrown,
but whose expectations still haunt your every step.

It’s not the kind of failure
that comes with broken glass or spilled coffee.
It’s the quiet kind,
the one that settles into your chest
like an uninvited guest.
It’s the kind that nobody sees,
except you—
alone in your car,
driving in circles,
waiting for the courage to walk back into your own life.

You think of your friends,
of how they’ve all found their way, ...