You begin to forget who you were before them. The silence they weaponized taught you to shrink. Every room became a minefield, you learned to read the air before breathing it. Their voice replaced your own, until doubt felt more familiar than certainty. You isolated not because you wanted solitude, but because explaining the inexplicable exhausted you. You scanned faces, tones, and pauses for danger. You became a student of someone else's moods, a stranger to your own. The cr