Chapter Text
I don’t even know why I still try to tell her things.
It’s like talking into a room where all the echoes already know what to say back. I told her about the promotion today. Head of Brand Strategy.
Those words meant something, at least for a few seconds.
And then she said, that’s nice, and moved on like I’d just told her I bought new shoes. I thought I’d be used to it by now.
But every time, it still catches something small inside me, a tiny spark of pride that burns out before it even glows.
She thinks she’s helping. I know she does. She believes she’s protecting me from the world, but she’s the one I’ve been hiding from the most. I keep telling myself she’s just worried, that she wants me to have the life she never had. But then I remember, she wants me to have her life, just cleaner.
The one she planned before I even had a name. And I hate myself for not being brave enough to say no. I can feel it, the walls, the smallness of it all. How every word she says fills the air, how every silence feels like a command I never agreed to. I know how to get out.
I know I could pack my things, cut the strings she tied around me years ago. But then she’d look at me like I broke something sacred, and I’d have to live with that look forever. So I stay. I stay and I smile and I let her think she’s right. Because the cage is small, but it’s familiar.
And sometimes familiar feels safer than free.
Lili stared at the words for a long time. The room was dim, the kind of light that makes everything look softer than it feels. She didn’t close the laptop right away. Outside, the rain had started again, a thin, steady sound that filled the silence.
Her matcha had gone cold. She drank it anyway. It was too watery, but it made her feel calm.
The things she wrote felt heavier now that they were real. She didn’t want to erase them, but she didn’t want to read them again either. She just closed the laptop and sat there for a moment, watching her reflection on the black screen.
Her face looked older tonight. Or maybe just honest.
She stood by the window. The city glowed faintly through the rain, blurred lights moving over wet streets. She thought about how much she loved it out there, the rhythm, the pace, the people who didn’t ask her to be anything more than what she was. At work, she could be sharp, confident, capable.
At home, she was still the quiet daughter who didn’t know how to say no. Her hands ached from biting her nails earlier. She rubbed her thumb across her palm until it stopped shaking. She wasn’t ready to leave. Not yet. But something small in her had shifted. A thought she couldn’t unthink. That maybe she didn’t have to live this way forever.
The idea scared her. It also made her breathe a little easier.
When she turned away from the window, she caught her reflection again, softer this time. Her eyes were tired, but steady.
Tomorrow she’d go back to work. She’d answer emails, lead another meeting, make people laugh. She’d move through the day like she always did. But tonight, for the first time in a long while, she let herself feel everything she had been holding in.
And in that quiet, Lili began to sense what it might mean to belong to herself.