"They never noticed me, a mere piece of folded paper, yet I held her dreams within my creases," lamented the old note.
Above the bustling midlands, a solitary cloud drifts silently. Inside its soft, billowy form, a gathering of forgotten items spins tales of their lives. Encased in the air, they are sometimes rendered invisible by rain or sunlight—but inside, they gather to confide their secrets.
"I am but a lonely shoe," confessed the right sneaker, "trapped in a closet, dreaming of long-forgotten jogs along the beach."
The sneaker's words are met with the rumbling voice of an old, crumpled newspaper, its headlines long faded. "You think you know confinement," it murmurs, "when my stories of the world, of wars and peace, lie abandoned beneath dust?"
"Once, I whispered sweet secrets," sighed the lonely pen, "but I now sit idle, ink dried like memories upon an unused page."
Encased within the cloud's embrace, each item laments its own confinement. While the shoe dreams of sandy shores, the pen desires nothing more than a blank page to turn its whispers into prose. The cloud remembers their words, weaving them into the very essence of its being—each sigh and puff a new narrative born from their shared longing.
And so, these objects watch silently, their dreams as ethereal as the cloud that carries them. Stories of forgotten lives, of mundane moments now etched into their inanimate souls, awaiting the day someone finds them, hears their tales, and understands the secrets.
Read the Journal's Silent Cry