Where Joy Is But A Fleeting Specter

I am not broken,
though the world insists
I am a puzzle missing its central piece.
They tell me: “Life without longing
is life without meaning,”
as if the quiet currents of my being
are a void they cannot fathom.

Their whispers grow louder,
swelling into shouts:
“Who will hold you when you’re old?
Who will walk beside you through the years?”
The words are not questions
but demands,
weights pressed onto shoulders
that never asked to bear them.

In their eyes,
I am a shadow of what could be—
an empty page in the book of love,
a song unsung,
a life unlit by desire.
They do not see
the vibrancy of my solitude,
the brilliance of my chosen connections,
the quiet warmth of a self
that does not yearn to split into two.

But the silence they leave me with
is not peaceful;
it is sharp,
carved by rejection,
etched with despair.
For every stone they cast
builds a wall around my hope,
turning the world into a narrow corridor,
where joy is but a fleeting specter.

Yet, even here,
I whisper to myself:
This is not all there is.
I hear the voices of elders
who braved this barren ground,
who bore the silence
and the weight of absence,
and who dreamed,
against all odds,
of a world that could hold us all.

And I dream, too,
of a place where love is not confined—
where hands reach out not to claim,
but to lift,
where lives unfold
in infinite hues
beyond the binaries they force upon us.

To those who stand where I stand,
let us take the stones they throw
and build not walls,
but pathways—
toward a future that sings
with the full spectrum of humanity,
where the whispers of our worth
become a roar of defiance,
and hopelessness dissolves
into the boundless sky of possibility.