THE BOY THEY KEPT
He learned to read the silence behind I love you.
The pause. The glance. The way they said his name
like a question they were tired of asking.
Every morning, they handed him a lie:
You are our first, our favorite, our everything.
But he had counted the times they forgot to say goodnight.
He had felt the weight of being chosen last
for the games that mattered.
The other boy, the one with the easy laugh,
the one who never had to ask,
stood always at the edge of every family photo,
not quite in, not quite out.
Just there, waiting.
And so was he,
waiting for a love that didn't need convincing,
for a hug that didn't end too soon,
for the day they'd stop proving
they could live without him.
They kept him like a spare key,
useful, maybe, but never the one
they reached for first.
He never felt loved.
Just tolerated between good news,
Just wanted when the loneliness grew loud
and the better ones were busy being beautiful.
One night, he wrote in a notebook no one will find:
"They said I was preferred, but preferred to what?
To nothing? To the empty chair?
I was the favorite of their leftovers."
Then he closed the book,
turned off the light, and fell asleep,
While practicing how to take up less space.
~kas