The Unseen

The weight of life weighs down on you at a place that is just beyond the edge of the earth, and no one else can see it. A realm where everything around you is governed by invisible forces rather than by physical borders. Forces so deeply embedded in the soil, the air, and the people that no one even knows they’re there—until they do.

I’ve spent my life in a town where everything stays the same: the same weather, the same streets, the same small faces passing by. It’s a place where nothing changes, and it’s easy to forget how much power the world holds over you. You’re born into a role, and you play it without thinking. If you’re born poor, you stay poor. If you’re born rich, you stay rich. Simple. Safe. Unquestioned.

That was my life—until I started noticing things. Small things at first. How the sky seemed darker in certain parts of the neighborhood. How people looked at me differently, like they could see the burden placed on me, without ever asking. It felt like the air itself was separating me from others, a barrier I couldn’t touch, but I felt every day.

I began to understand: the people with power—the ones in big houses on the hill, in their brand-new shoes—didn’t feel the weight I felt. They didn’t see the cracks in the pavement, the dirt under their nails. They lived as if the world wasn’t crumbling around them, held together only by a thin, invisible thread no one dared acknowledge.

Then, one day, I walked past the park—the so-called “community space”—and noticed something different. It was the same patch of grass, the same swing set, the same tired benches. But when I looked closely, I saw it. At first, just a shift in the air. But the longer I stood there, the clearer it became: the ground beneath the park was sinking. Slowly. Unnoticed.

I tried to tell people, but they wouldn’t listen. They didn’t care. How could they? It wasn’t their park. It wasn’t their community. It wasn’t their problem.

That’s when it hit me: the world is built this way. The people at the top can’t feel the sinking ground. They can’t see the way the air thickens in places where people are forgotten. They don’t hear the whispers of inequality, of systemic rot, because they stand on solid ground.

But for the rest of us, the weight is crushing. It presses down with every breath. We walk, and the ground shifts beneath our feet, but no one seems to notice. No one looks at the cracks, the long-standing neglect.

We can feel it. We see it. But we are the unseen.

And they'll all be left wondering how it occurred when the ground finally gives way one day. They will never know what it's like to walk on sinking dirt or to live in a society where everything that is broken has been ignored for so long.

They will never know what it's like to be unseen.