Plu sat alone in a room dimly lit by the softness of late evening. The kind of silence that fills a space when the world outside is done with its noise lingered heavy in the air. And yet, inside Plu, there was a war raging—one that had begun long ago and never really paused.
This wasn’t a story about triumphs or rising above the ashes. No. This was the story of someone who kept losing and lived to remember every fall. Plu had lost battles they barely understood, and even the ones they won felt hollow, like victories carved from sorrow. The truth haunted them: they had been losing long before they even learned how to fight.
They were never the hero in someone’s story. Never the one people stayed with. “Winners don’t linger around the wounded,” Plu whispered to no one. Every person who ever stood beside them eventually drifted, as if the gravity of their sadness was too much to hold onto.
There was something uniquely cruel about the way love arrived in Plu’s life—not like a balm, but like a weapon. It came in the form of people who had already been filled, already belonged, already learned how to give and receive. Plu remained an outsider to this rhythm of belonging. And when they reached for it, love recoiled, then returned only to press deeper wounds. Love didn’t save Plu. It broke them—quietly, secretly, devastatingly.
Every night was the same ritual. Plu would crawl into bed not to rest but to recover. From invisible wounds. From words unsaid. From the heaviness of existing without a place to feel safe. They cried, but only into their own hands. They screamed, but only in silence. And every morning, they put on the face of someone who had everything—a mask of privilege that fooled everyone but themselves.
No one knew the version of Plu that crumbled every night. The version that remembered a moment at ten or eleven years old—after a storm, in a strange, delicate calm—when they tried to build something for themselves. A dream, a hope, maybe a version of home. But the wind came again. And again. And again. And all it ever did was destroy.
Plu’s pain was old. Ancient. A wound that never scabbed over. They remembered how others—he, she, they—all found their reflections in each other. They were raised in the warm soil of love, care, and affection. They fought each other sometimes, sure, but they won because they belonged to one another.
Plu, on the other hand, was built in the shadows of absence. Built silently. Carefully. Secretively. And when the world around them moved on, found its people, found its warmth, Plu stayed still—buried beneath the wreckage of unshared feelings and unspoken truths.
Even now, as they wrote into the quiet of the room, the words bled from their fingers like confession. “This is all I have,” Plu thought. “Wounds, pain, tears. But they are mine.”
At some point, the world had named Plu the villain. Maybe to make the story easier to tell. Maybe because it was easier to blame the quiet one. And Plu believed it. Believed it so deeply that even when love knocked again, they didn’t trust it. They flinched. Because the last time, love didn’t save them. It buried them alive.
They had met love before. A few times. But it never stayed. It came cloaked in hope and left them hollow. It stabbed quietly, then walked away smiling. Every time Plu tried to offer what little they had left, love called them hate and turned its back.
So Plu stopped. They stopped knocking. Stopped trying. And the doors never opened again.
He loved. She loved. They loved. And Plu watched them all from the distance of a soul too wounded to speak.
And now, sitting alone, they wrote. Not to be heard. But to remind themselves they were still here. Because no one else remembered. No one else saw.
This story doesn’t end with healing. It doesn’t end with closure.
But it is real.
And sometimes, that’s all a soul like Plu has left.
