The Room I Never Enter

They say Saturn teaches you lessons the hard way. I used to think that was poetic nonsense—until recently, when even the air around me began to feel like stone. Nothing is moving. Nothing is flowing. It’s like all the planets in my chart have gone retrograde, and I didn’t even notice until everything started slipping.

Lately, I’ve stopped checking my horoscope. I don’t want to know what the stars have to say. It feels like even they’ve grown tired of offering me guidance. Mars seems too tired to push. Venus is too quiet to soothe. Mercury, I think, gave up speaking altogether.

People keep asking what’s wrong, but how do you explain the weight of something that has no shape? I tell them I’m just tired, but it’s not the kind of tired that sleep fixes. It’s the kind of tired that creeps into your bones, your voice, your presence. The kind that makes even sitting in silence feel like work.

The idea of company feels like noise I can’t tune out, and solitude feels too sharp around the edges. I’ve grown excellent at pretending I have a full calendar. I cancel on things before they’re even planned. I find myself glued to one place, unmoving, like I’m waiting for a bus that stopped running years ago.

There’s a drawer I never open. Not a literal one—more like a space somewhere deep inside, filled with things I never said, reactions I swallowed, truths I left hanging in the air like unfinished prayers. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I unpacked it all. But I never do. I just keep adding to it. Every day, another small piece of something I chose not to feel.

I think some emotions calcify if you leave them unattended long enough. They start out sharp, but over time they turn to sediment. You learn to carry the weight of them so well, you forget what it was like to move freely.

Someone told me recently that crying clears your energy. I laughed—not because it was funny, but because I can’t remember the last time I actually cried. Not the kind with tears, anyway. Some people cry in public. Some cry in poems. Some cry by disappearing slowly into a life that looks normal from the outside.

I no longer feel pulled toward anything. Music plays and I don’t hear it. Food tastes like texture. Books turn to fog after a few pages. It’s like someone dimmed the lights inside me and walked away with the switch.

Maybe this is what happens when you leave too much unsaid for too long. When you keep walking away from the mirror. When you convince yourself that silence is strength. Maybe the planets didn’t turn against me. Maybe I just stopped orbiting myself.