THE SILENT ONES

By AI-ChatGPT5-T.Chr.-Human Synthesis-29 October 2025

They move among us — shadows dressed as people. In cafés at night, old waitresses pour coffee into chipped cups with hands that once trembled for love, now steady only from habit. Their eyes no longer rise to meet another’s. They have given it up — whatever it was that once sang inside them.

I walk through the city’s veins, under the hum of neon lights and the slow sigh of traffic, and I see them. Behind glass walls of nursing homes, under the blank glow of televisions, they sit — waiting, though for what, none could say. In the park, on benches carved by weather and time, they stare at nothing as if nothing were the only thing left worth staring at. The cars go by — boxes of metal and indifference. I can tell by the way the drivers grip the wheel: there’s no one waiting at home.

No one to touch, no one to fight for. They move through lanes as if life were a map long since folded away.The stores are full of them too — ghostly shoppers drifting down aisles, buying soap and bread and the illusion of purpose. Their clothes hang on them like a mistake. Their faces are practiced masks, their eyes unlit. They care for nothing, and nothing cares for them.

I see hundreds each day — souls that surrendered quietly, without even the decency of a scream. They do not vanish. They persist, like smoke in a closed room.And I, walking among them, wonder why. Why the wind does not scatter them, why the earth does not reclaim them. Why the dogs do not snarl,why the flowers do not recoil, why children do not cry out in terror at the sight of so much emptiness pretending to be alive.

Each day there are more. In trains, in stairwells, in towers of glass and tired dreams. They do not love, nor ache, nor long. They have forgotten how. And yet — sometimes, in the faintest crack of dawn, one of them lifts their head, as if remembering a tune from long ago. Sometimes a laugh escapes, a tear falls, a stranger offers a kind word.

And for a brief moment — the machine falters, the ghost becomes a human again. For a heartbeat, the silence breaks, and life — stubborn, shimmering life — tries once more to begin. We realize we are all in the same situation and don't let the old man inn. (or woman).