I was born into silence. Not the absence of noise, but the kind that hums just beneath everything, like the air itself is trying not to speak too loudly. My school uniform always fit, the trains always ran on time, and our streets were lined with flags that never sagged in the wind. I was told we lived in order, in peace, in the world that had finally been made right. And I believed it—at first.

In the classroom, our teacher read from a book with no smudges, no torn pages, no names I didn’t recognize. Our lessons were crisp: history was a triumph, not a tragedy. There were no enemies, only shadows that once existed and were rightly cleared away. When I asked why we never studied certain people, she smiled in that careful way adults do when they don’t want you to look too deeply. “They didn’t fit,” she said. “This world is better without confusion.”

At home, Father stood tall in his polished boots, and Mother smiled when the neighborhood loudspeakers played the national hymn. I remember her humming it while washing dishes, like a prayer. Our walls had portraits—not of family, but of leaders. Men with sharp eyes and shoulders that seemed to carry time itself. I grew up learning not to question them, not because I feared punishment, but because there was simply no room for doubt. Doubt was inefficient.

And yet, there were moments. Brief flickers. A crooked tree in the park with initials carved too deep to erase. A man who used to run the bookstore and suddenly didn’t. An old woman who looked at me like I was a stranger in my own skin. These things weren’t explained. They just disappeared.

I remember once walking home alone in the rain, and I saw something scratched into the stone wall of a demolished building. A symbol I didn’t recognize. It was ugly and beautiful at the same time. It didn’t belong. And yet—it felt real. Like someone had tried to speak one last time before being silenced forever.

I wiped it away with my sleeve.

That night, I had a dream. I was standing in a room filled with books written in languages I couldn’t read, with music playing that made my chest ache. There were faces—faces I had never seen but somehow knew. They didn’t speak, but they watched me. Not with anger. With sorrow.

I woke up before sunrise and sat in the kitchen in the dark. I felt like I had swallowed something ancient. Something forbidden.

I live in a world without ghosts, without questions, without strangers. But sometimes, when no one is looking, I wonder if the silence around me is not peace, but a scream that’s been buried so deep, we’ve forgotten how to hear it.