She thinks sometimes that she is an option in her own life, a checkbox left unticked, a soft maybe hovering at the edge of forms she never finished filling out, and the thought arrives with the dull administrative thud of paperwork, the way existence can feel like a waiting room where her name is mispronounced and she stands anyway, unsure if she was called or only imagined being summoned, and the city floats around her with its certainties – buses arrive when scheduled, lights change their minds on time, doors open because hands ask them to, while she moves through this machinery of permission like a footnote, present but not required for the sentence to make sense.

     There are days when she believes that staying is a kind of rudeness, that her body takes up air that could have been cleaner without her breath in it, that her shadow interrupts pavements that would otherwise lie smoothly in their own long patience, and she rehearses the argument with herself the way others rehearse small talk, telling herself that existence is not compulsory, that one can quietly step out of the room of the world without slamming the door, and the thought feels polite, almost kind, like leaving a party early so no one has to pretend they were enjoying her company longer than they were.

     She learned this logic young, though she could not then name it, learned it in rooms where attention was rationed and silence counted as maturity, learned it in the soft economics of affection where love came with conditions she could never quite read in time, learned it in the way apologies were expected to be preemptive, offered before any harm was named, and so she carries this private constitution inside her, a small legal document of the soul that states: you may be here, provided you do not require too much, you may stay, provided you do not make noise, you may exist, provided you are willing to vanish on request, and yet her body refuses to sign this contract fully, her lungs keep insisting on filling, her feet keep choosing pavement over void, her eyes keep catching on small bright survivals, a cup of steam in a café window, a dog shaking rain from its coat with ridiculous seriousness, the way the river sometimes flashes copper when the light hits it just wrong, and these are not reasons exactly, not arguments strong enough to win debates with the darker clauses of her thinking, but they are interruptions, footnotes to the footnote, small addendums that whisper: still here, still here, still here.

     She wonders if everyone carries this secret referendum inside them, this ongoing vote about whether to continue being, and whether the people who look certain have simply learned to rig the ballots with habit and routine, while she keeps leaving hers blank, hovering in the doorway of choice as if the very act of choosing would be a betrayal of some truer emptiness she feels loyal to, and the bridge is not yet in her sight but it is already in her thinking as a grammar, as a structure that suggests that movement has directions and that directions have consequences.

     Optional, she tells herself, tasting the word as if it were a doctrine, and the word opens and closes like a small door in her chest, and she does not step through it, not yet, but she keeps her hand on the handle, just to feel that it is there, just to reassure herself that staying is not the only verb available to her, that presence is not a sentence without an ending, and the night folds around her with its indifferent patience, and she walks on with this knowledge like a thin blade hidden in her sleeve, not to cut anything yet, only to remind herself that even breathing can be a choice, even standing here can be a decision, even the act of not leaving is, quietly, an action.