Sometimes

Sometimes the morning does not arrive so much as it presses down like a lid, tight enough to muffle every thought yet loose enough to let in the dull mechanical hum of a world that seems to function perfectly well without any contribution from here. There is air..........technically and yet each breath feels negotiated, a reluctant loan from a universe that keeps its generosity for someone else. The jug clatters, water boils, but the sound echoes as if performed off‑stage, belonging to a scene from which the protagonist has quietly slipped.

Sometimes walking through a doorway feels like trespassing. The corridor at an office, the aisles of a supermarket, even the kitchen in a friend’s house, all of them shrink the moment a body enters, as though the geometry tilts to expose how little space was available in the first place. People say, “No, you’re fine,” with well‑meant warmth, but the words land like a polite cough, a signal to stand closer to the wall, to apologise for existing so loudly. It is possible to become expert at folding shoulders inward, at trimming conversation down to nods, at pretending the exit sign is magnetic.

Sometimes memory plays curator to a small private museum of moments that should have been ordinary but ended up carved with regret. The hurried interruption mid‑sentence that left a thought half‑born and hanging. The chair scraped back a little too abruptly in a crowded café. The silence after offering an idea and watching it drift down like mist instead of catching fire. Each fragment exhibits a single caption: you were in the way.

Visitors: self‑doubt, guilt, the relentless critic, tour the collection daily, never tired of pointing out the flaws in the lighting.

Sometimes the mirror refuses any soft filter. It shows a face both too familiar and wholly alien, the eyes carrying tired negotiations with sleep and sorrow, the mouth rehearsing neutrality in case anyone asks the wrong question. There is no obvious tragedy here, no headline grief, just a quiet erosion where edges once existed. Friends will speak of resilience, of the phoenix that rises, but some mornings the ash is still too hot to sift, and the bird, if it ever nested, left no forwarding address.

Sometimes night offers a fragile kindness. Street‑lamps draw long shadows that stretch beyond their bodies, reminding that even thin outlines have a place on the footpath. The hum of distant traffic becomes a lullaby in another language, one that doesn’t insist on answers. In that dim light, it is briefly possible to imagine that being in the way is still being somewhere. Existence, however awkward, still alters the pattern of the dark, and perhaps that disturbance is not always unwelcome.

Sometimes the thought surfaces that there is an unseen ledger, meticulously balanced, where every interference is counter‑weighted by footprints never taken, by sentences withheld, by apologies whispered into empty rooms. No‑one else will audit it, but the mind keeps a furious arithmetic. And yet, occasionally, the numbers blur, a column slips sideways, and a single memory glints: laughter shared despite the inner storm, an arm around a shoulder, a message that simply read, “I’m glad you were there.” The ledger does not erase itself, but the page loosens, the ink runs, the total wavers.

Sometimes, and this is hardest to admit, the weight of being in everyone’s way turns out to be the gravity that keeps the heart from floating off into numb detachment. Friction hurts, but it also marks contact, and contact means something is still alive enough to feel. Standing inconveniently in a queue, misplacing keys at the worst moment, interrupting with a half‑formed idea, each small collision is proof of movement, of a person intersecting with other lives rather than disappearing between them.

Sometimes there is no neat conclusion. The story ends mid‑paragraph, the day folds into uneasy sleep, and the question of worth remains unanswered. Yet beneath the unanswered lies a slower pulse, older than doubt and quieter than shame, repeating a single improbable claim: presence is not a mistake. It may bruise and blunder; it may take up space where silence once rested, but it is real, and because it is real, it already matters.

And sometimes.......only sometimes..........that is enough to let tomorrow crack open just wide enough for another breath.