Girls Own the Void
On distance, stillness, and the parts of us we never offered
Some things aren’t meant to be stated outright. They’re better left implied, like the pause before a reply, or the feeling of being watched and not looked at. The outline matters more than the centre. The echo more than the sound.
I’ve always found comfort in what slips by unnoticed. A glance that doesn’t land. A sentence that never finishes. The half-formed thought you don’t say aloud because it wouldn’t survive the air. This isn’t a story. It doesn’t want resolution. It wants quiet. A kind of stillness where nothing is demanded, and nothing explains itself.
Call it a study in distance. Call it a refusal. Either way, it stays just out of reach, exactly where it belongs.
Girl as Negative Space
I’ve never liked being seen clearly. There’s something invasive about it. The way people treat recognition like possession, as if naming you means they get to keep you. I’ve never felt safe inside someone else’s understanding of me. It always flattens. It always asks for more.
Clarity turns you into something with edges. Something fixed. It asks for explanation. For continuity. For presence. But I never planned to last that long. I prefer the blur. That soft fading at the edge of things, when your eyes lose focus, or your body’s in the room but your mind is floating just above it. That’s where I feel most like myself. Not solid. Not quite gone either. Just hovering. A trace. The afterimage of a thought that didn’t finish forming.
I’ve never performed mystery. I just got good at giving people nothing to work with. To move without offering angles. Stillness came naturally, watching first, answering later, if at all. I stopped handing things over before I knew what they meant to me.
Some feelings flicker too briefly to survive outside the body. Some thoughts don’t want to become language. So I let them stay where they are. Quiet. Intact. Not hidden. Just left untranslated.
The ones who ask what’s wrong are always the ones who can’t bear a quiet room. They need answers, shape, a role to play. I’ve never written myself for that. I don’t need to be echoed. I don’t need to be understood in someone else’s words.
The Void Is Ours Because We Named It
Sartre said the void appears when the world slips. I think it moves quieter than that. It doesn’t break through; it lingers. A thinning. A slow unfastening. One by one, things stop holding their shape. The light shifts. The room forgets its centre. Meaning doesn’t vanish. It just fades, gently, like something backing out of the frame.
I don’t mind the void. It never presses in. It never asks for shape or story. It just lets me be still. It’s the only place I’ve found where nothing is expected of me—not an answer, not a version, not a thread to follow. People say they want honesty. What they mean is: wrap it up nicely and don’t make me uncomfortable. They want your sadness to unfold like a letter. They want your silence to resolve. The void doesn’t do that. It doesn’t move. It just stays, calm and unchanged, long after everyone else has left.
Plath understood what it meant to sit inside the ache and not flinch. To hold it still until it stopped needing language. That cold clarity. That kind of control. I don’t want comfort. I want to be left alone. The void lets me stay unfinished. It never asks for names, or reasons, or anything that would fix me in place. It doesn’t feel tragic. It doesn’t feel numb. It just feels quiet.
They say emptiness is unbearable. I don’t think that’s true. What wears you down isn’t the quiet; it’s the pull to fill it. To explain it. To make something out of it. The void doesn’t need that. It’s the only clarity I trust. Nothing to hold, nothing to shape, nothing to give back. Just space. Just stillness. We recognised it the moment it stopped asking. That’s why it belongs to us.
Dissociation Is a Skillset
I leave rooms without moving. Sometimes mid-sentence. Sometimes, long before anyone notices. There’s no cue. No shift. Just something in me folding inward, gently, like a page turning itself. It doesn’t feel deliberate, but it’s never accidental either. I don’t drift. I just loosen my grip and let the moment go on without me.
Dostoevsky’s underground man didn’t just retreat; he turned retreat into refusal. He saw how easily language became performance, how even honesty was a kind of costume. He wanted out, but he also wanted to be witnessed on his own terms. I think about that often; not his bitterness, but his precision. The way he watched himself watching everything else.
I never bothered to explain it like he did. I just began slipping out of moments that felt too shaped, too loud, too sure of themselves. Not because I hated them. Just because they stopped feeling optional. There’s a point where presence starts to feel like agreement. Where staying becomes a kind of surrender. I’ve always felt more like myself just outside the frame.
People think it’s numbness. But numbness is silence. This is something else. When things start to press too close, too heavy, too real, I let go a little. My body stays where it is. The rest of me lifts. Just enough to slip beneath it. Plath once wrote of being inhabited by a cry. I know that feeling. Not a scream, not even a sound, just a vibration beneath thought. Unspoken, unformed. It stays low, steady. I carry it with me, like a hum I never learned how to stop.
I don’t feel guilty about it. There’s nothing to apologise for. I’ve learned how to step back without leaving. How to listen without staying. If you’ve never slipped out of a moment and watched it from somewhere cooler, quieter, further away, then no, you won’t understand. And that’s alright. It was never meant for you.
Pretty Isn’t the Same as Present
I never understood why being seen was supposed to mean I had something to give. As if looking were a kind of claim. As if presence meant I was open. Sometimes I stay because it’s easier than leaving. Sometimes I stay because I’ve already left in every way that matters. And sometimes I let myself be beautiful because it keeps people from asking the wrong questions. Or worse, waiting too long for answers I don’t owe.
I’ve never wanted to be fully known. There’s something harsh about it, how quickly understanding becomes ownership, how naming reduces what should have stayed soft. I’d rather be seen from a distance. Just enough to remain a shape. Something you notice, maybe misread. But left alone.
Sartre wrote women as paintings—glimpsed, returned to, never quite resolved. Not because they were elusive, but because they stayed outside the frame of certainty. I’ve always understood that, not for the beauty of it, but for the distance. There’s safety in being slightly misunderstood. People don’t linger for long when they can’t make sense of you.
I’m not looking to be solved. Let them look once, and move on. Let them guess. Let them say it’s nothing. Let them pass. If something in me goes unnoticed, that’s alright. It was never meant to be shared.