He wasn’t loud.
Not broken. Not bright.
Just quiet in the kind of way
that should have worried someone—
the kind of quiet that waits
to see if anyone notices
before it decides whether to stay.
They called him shy.
But he wasn’t.
He just learned early
that words are expensive
when no one is listening.
He spoke once.
Twice.
Then less.
Then not at all.
Rooms trained him well—
how to raise a hand and still be unseen,
how to swallow sentences halfway through,
how to nod like you understand
when you’ve already disappeared.
His notebooks were full of monsters—
not the ones under beds,
but the ones who paid bills,
who wore clean shoes and polite smiles,
who asked “How was school today?”
with their eyes already somewhere else.
No bruises.
No screaming.
Nothing you could point to and say,
There. That’s the problem.
An ache shaped like “you should be fine.”
A pain disguised as normal.
The kind of hurt
no one teaches you how to name
because it doesn’t leave marks.
He learned that adults love
the version of you
that doesn’t interrupt,
doesn’t cry too long,
doesn’t need explanations,
doesn’t ask for more.
So he made himself smaller.
Folded his needs into corners.
Learned how to take up
as little space as possible.
Small enough to fit inside silence.
Small enough to disappear in photographs.
Small enough to curl into himself
and call it maturity.
He smiled when cameras appeared.
Laughed on cue.
Said “I’m okay”
until it sounded believable.
Teachers called him well-behaved.
Relatives called him easy.
Everyone agreed
he was such a good child.
And he tried so hard
to stay that way.
He became perfect.
Polite.
Low-maintenance.
Invisible.
And in doing so,
he vanished
piece by piece,
day by day,
quietly—
so no one felt guilty.
Now,
when people speak of him, they say,
“He was always such a quiet kid.”
As if that explains everything.
As if quiet is a personality,
not a survival skill.
And he was.
So quiet
that no one noticed
when he stopped growing.
So quiet
that by the time they looked back,
there was nothing left to call a childhood.
Only dust—
where a voice
should have been.
About the Poetess
This poem has been selected as a part of the Submission under LIB Literature Festival 2026 which was organized by LIB Literary Chapter in association with The Literary Mirror under the patronage and mentorship of IPS Vikas Vaibhav and the able leadership of Jyoti Jha. The poem has been written by Suhani who is a commerce student in Patna Women’s College.
