Shadows blanket the walls in murky darkness like an eclipse of the light from above. The walls are blank, prisoner to the possessive penumbra. Masks of invisibility intertwine with the unlit areas; everything, no matter the size or the shape, becomes hidden, imperceptible to the world.

A cloak is brewing along the wall.

This cloak fosters a life that eyes often do not percept, for they inadvertently overlook it. Insignificant to their goals, the eyes glissade down the walls, gaining speed as they search for their prize.

Underneath the cloak—one still woefully ignored by the world—another extraneous life balefully blooms, and she utilizes dusk as a weapon that the masses do not notice. Slowly, she grows. Minutes feel like hours when the only available option is to watch the lives of others leisurely, without any restrictions or pain, walk by, smiling and radiating the bright joy that the shadowy corners have never felt.

Their eyes stumble past her life growing in their blind peripherals as they laugh, constantly facing forwards. They stumble past the unadorned darkness. They stumble past neglected shadows, past lost people, past life.

They stumble past a whole different world, one they can not wrap their minds around. While in pursuit of their own perfected path, this world exists, and that particular girl remains within it as the only life she knows.

Surrounded by shadows, by darkness, by meek others, she has grown with them. She has found comfort in them. Her day-to-day life prevails uninterrupted as she stays imperceptible to the stream of strangers passing by still blind to her presence.

Yet at the beginning of her life, she did not accept this; she did accept being invisible.

Aching to fight, her heart called for war against her mind with the sole goal of leaving from out under the cloak. In the earlier years, she wore bright colors to protest for attention. Maybe the eyes would notice. Maybe the heads would turn, whether for better or for worse.

But the invisibility broke her over time, weaving itself into the core of her bones. Deep inside her—the depths of her very soul—the darkness spread; it took over her mind, and over the years, she fell into line like another one of the mass-produced robots she swore to fight.

Now she silently stands in those dastardly shadows, and still, she watches.

And I stand, forgotten and hidden, with her.