There are days I unfold myself like old paper and cannot find the place marked welcome. Voices pass — glass on glass — laughing with names that do not fit my mouth. I practice conversation in the mirror: how to ask, how to stay, how to keep my shoulders light. When him arrives in memory — a quiet gravity — my tongue becomes a locked garden gate. I carry a pocketful of almost-words, each one a map I’m too shy to read aloud. So I learn to speak in other ways: a note folded into my coat, a sigh that becomes song, planting kindness in the small corners I own. If loneliness is a country, I will draw roads from it — slowly, badly, bravely — until one leads to another hand.