No—closer than that.I need you to hear me,because if you stand too far,you'll only get the echoeverybody else gets.The laugh.The joke.The reflexive, "I'm good, man."That's not me.That's the exit sign glowing over a room I never let anyone walk into.So welcome. You're inside now.Don't reach for a light switch.There isn't one. I unscrewed it years ago, because the dark started to feel more honest than any bulb.This isn't empty in here.It's a crowd.Every version of me I had to kill to survive daylight is still standing in the corners, still breathing, still asking why I let them die one by one so a stranger could call me "fine."Memories that refuse sleep.Conversations I re-run at 3 a.m., convinced that this time the ending will bend. It never bends. It just keeps ending the exact same way, in the exact same silence, like a wound that reopens itself out of spite.And that voice—you hear it? Give it a moment.It waits for silence the way something with teeth waits for stillness.It tells me I'm too much.Then it tells me I'm nothing at all, not even worth the word "too."It tells me to stop caring about anyone.Then it drags out every name I've ever loved and lost and failed, and makes me hold each one in my two hands, in the dark, until they shake — until I can't tell if I'm gripping the memory or being gripped by it.It tells me I'm strong.Then it laughs, low and slow, at how easily I still fall for that lie.That's the particular cruelty of my own mind—it builds me up and guts me with the same hands, and somehow I keep calling it company.Because at least it stays.Nobody else hears any of this.Nobody sees it.I built a version of myself so convincing that some nights even I believe he's real — the easy one, the fine one, the one who laughs on cue and never once looks like he's drowning in a room full of people.I learned early that my pain got heavier the moment I handed it to someone else, so I stopped handing it over.I became funny.I became steady.I became the one everybody leaned on, without ever asking what was holding me up.Nothing was.I was just very good at looking load-bearing.And somewhere in all that leaning, I forgot I was allowed to fall too.Look at my face.Go on. Really look.That smile—it used to be mine. Sometimes it still is, for seconds at a time, like weather that breaks through by accident.But mostly now it's a mask stitched on so early in my life that it's grown roots into the skin, and lately the stitches are giving out.Do you know what it costs to feel your own face start failing as a disguise? To feel it slip mid-sentence, mid-laugh, mid-"I'm good," and have to yank it back into place before anyone notices what's underneath?What happens when someone finally asks "are you okay?" and for once the lie doesn't come?What happens when "I'm fine" dies somewhere in my throat, and something older — something that's been rotting quietly for years — starts climbing out instead?I don't know.I've never let it get that far.Listen.There.That sound. That's the anger.People think anger shows up from nowhere, uninvited, random.Mine has roots going down through every year I swallowed instead of spoke.Every time I said "I'm used to it" about things a person should never get used to.Every time I forgave something before I'd even finished bleeding from it.Every time I told myself a man endures, a man doesn't need anybody, a man carries it alone and calls the carrying strength—so I endured,and endured,and endured,until enduring started looking exactly like disappearing.Not all at once.Quieter than that. The slow kind. The kind where you wake up one day and realize pieces of you just aren't answering anymore.The part of me that trusted people — gone quiet.The part that believed if I was good enough, useful enough, easy enough, someone would finally stay — gone quieter still.I don't always know if they're dead or just hiding somewhere even I can't reach.Sometimes I hear them underneath everything else, faint, like knocking from inside a wall I built myself, brick by brick, out of every person who left anyway.Sometimes I miss them so violently it feels like grieving someone who technically is still alive in here. Just gone somewhere I can't follow anymore.You'd think I'm afraid of the dark.I'm not.I'm afraid of what's left standing when there's nothing bright enough left to perform for.Because the dark doesn't flatter me. It doesn't clap for the mask. It doesn't tell me I'm fine, doesn't tell me I'm strong, doesn't tell me anything at all.It just watches.And waits.And in that waiting I meet him—not Powell the joke,not Powell the fighter,not the Powell everyone else needs me to be so their day stays easy—just Powell.Hollowed.Furious.Tired in a way sleep doesn't touch.
Still, somehow, throwing questions up into a sky that has never once thrown one back.God, why build a mind that turns on its own architect?God, if You hear everything, why does it feel like my worst nights go straight to voicemail, every time, without fail?God, where were You the night I sat inside this exact silence and it swallowed every word I tried to send You?God, I have asked and asked until asking felt like begging, and the sky has only ever answered with more sky.And still—still—I haven't stopped believing.That's the part that makes no sense, even to me, some nights especially.I curse You in one breath and reach for You in the next, both hands, like I'm not sure which one You'll actually take.I call You absent. Then I call You Father in the very same broken sentence, like a child who's furious at his parent but still runs to them the second the dark gets too loud.Maybe that's not doubt.Maybe that's what faith looks like when it's bleeding out and still refuses to let go of Your sleeve — white-knuckled, exhausted, holding on out of something more stubborn than hope.Mental health isn't always collapse you can point a camera at.Sometimes it's quieter than any word for it.Sometimes it's laughing at the right moments while watching yourself from somewhere outside your own body, like a stranger studying a stranger.Sometimes it's typing "hey" to the one person who might actually catch you, and deleting it before you lose the nerve to keep pretending you don't need catching.Sometimes it's lying beside someone you love and still drowning, quietly, in a silence they can't hear because you trained yourself not to make a sound while sinking.Sometimes it's just being tired of being tired of explaining the tired, until even the explaining feels like too much weight to lift.So if you came looking for a monster,I'm sorry to disappoint you.There isn't one.There's only a boy who got frighteningly good at burying his wounds under ordinary Tuesdays, under jokes, under "I'm good, man," under a smile he's worn so long it started wearing him back.Only a mind that rarely, if ever, feels like home.Only someone who spent so long holding everyone else together that he forgot he was ever allowed to come apart, too — that coming apart wasn't a failure, just a fact of being human.Maybe that's the real haunting.Not that I'm broken.But that I convinced myself, somewhere along the way, that breaking was the price of being loved, and I paid it over and over without ever once checking if love was supposed to cost that much.So—hello there.You've met him now.The real one.The tired one.The one who argues with God in the dark and still calls Him Father by morning.Don't look away yet.I'm still here.And if I smile at you tomorrow, don't assume the dark left.It didn't.Some rooms stay dark for a very long time. Longer than anyone outside them would ever believe.But there's a difference between living inside the darkand finally, after everything it's cost me, learning where the door is.I haven't opened it. Not tonight.But underneath all that noise — under the anger, under the doubt, under every unanswered question I've thrown at a sky that never throws anything back —there's still a voice that sounds like mine.Not the cruel one.Not the one that laughs when I believe something good about myself.Mine.Small.Barely holding the line.Saying the only thing it has left to say tonight:
"Stay."
So I will.Just for tonight.God, I still don't understand You.I'm not sure I ever will.But I'm still here, still asking, still Yours somehow, even furious.And maybe tonight,that's the whole prayer.