a nod

There is a certain weariness that grows in the shoulders and neck, not from work or a sleepless night, but from constant vigilance. It is a body memory, a silent internal compass, the arrow of which is always pointed not to the north, but to the nearest obstacle. Over the years, this compass becomes so refined that it begins to move through the world like water, instinctively bypassing stones before touching them. You learn to enter a room not as a person, but as a shadow - quietly, without pretensions, immediately finding that one point of space where you will least interfere with others breathing, gesturing, living. It becomes a constant, silent apology for its own scale.

At this party, in a strange apartment, full of laughter and smoke, I once again became a piece of furniture placed in the wrong place. People didn't get out of my way - they just flowed around me like river water around a stone, unconsciously recognizing me as an obstacle, not a participant. I stood a little further away, by the window, and my eyes naturally caught the dust on the top of the cupboards and the cobwebs on the deck, scenery unseen by others. It was my exclusive privilege that no one else needed.

Life was boiling around - hysterical laughter, glasses clattering to teeth, someone passionately, leaning forward, proving his truth, but it all unfolded before me as if through a thick glass. I heard not words but a general cacophony, I saw not faces but the pattern of moving heads. The warm, half-empty beer bottle in my palm was my anchor, the only thing with a clear weight and shape in this social chaos. I was a fact. A geometric problem. Unsolvable.

No, it wasn't a tragedy. Tragedy requires struggle, hope, catharsis. And here was just a constant, an axiom written in my body language. The world is made for average shoes, and I was simply born with a different measurement. And no talk of the communion of souls or the universality of love could remove that primal, physical awkwardness from which all the others arose.

I saw how the girl in the corner quietly, almost imperceptibly, put her head on the boy's shoulder. He didn't even move, only his fingers gently squeezed her hand. A small, intimate world inside a big world. For a moment I felt more than jealousy. I felt the clarity of the observer. The realization that proximity is not an idea, but a physics. It is an opportunity to fit comfortably next to each other. It's a miracle that happens to those who fit the scale.

I realized that it was time for me. I used to think that sadness is like a perfect melody played from soul to soul. With its help, we find our loved ones. That pain vibrates in the air as if the most sensitive notes are not heard by the ears at all. But later it turned out that, just like in this room, each of us is playing for ourselves. Out loud and with your eyes closed. And those dozens of individual melodies, colliding in the air, do not turn into a symphony. It's just noise. Total deafness. I saw that there was nothing to listen to. And there is no one to hear you. Therefore, I was not preparing to leave the party - I was preparing to leave their picture, in which I was only a detail in the background. I was a quiet, still reference point, and now that point is simply gone.

Door frame.

I nodded.

I left