Cycle I · “The Hidden Voice” · 23

She’s never been a math person, but she knows the language.

People talk about love like it’s numbers you can balance:

“Two halves make a whole.”

“You’re my better half.”

“Love is fifty–fifty.”

It always sounds tidy until you’re the one doing the math and realizing one of you keeps giving more than half.

Tonight she’s curled up with her laptop, half-doomscrolling through kink essays and half-stalking her own message history. There’s one thread she keeps opening and closing: someone she swore wouldn’t matter, who now takes up more space in her head than her own plans do.

She stumbles over this piece and reads the “Solve for Statement” line twice.

One’s self-discovery is more important than anyone they could ever encounter…

She wants that to be The Truth. Capital T. She has the journal pages, the therapy phrases, the affirmations saved in her camera roll to prove it.

Then she hits:

The statement is proven correct until challenged.

Something in her slumps and straightens at the same time.

Because yeah — it was correct. Right up until she met someone who made her:

Check her phone first thing in the morning,
Rewrite her weekend plans around maybe seeing their name light up,
Wonder what version of herself they’re seeing on the other side.

For a minute, she feels stupid for letting anyone get that far inside her circumference. Then she reads the last line:

Or, we are undefined.

She exhales, just a little.

Maybe she’s not failing Self-Discovery 101. Maybe the math was always supposed to look like this: messy, shifting, not cleanly solvable.

She doesn’t message the person she’s thinking about. She also doesn’t delete the thread.

Instead, she opens a note and writes:

“I want to be the most important thing in my own life.
I also want someone who could actually challenge that.
Both can be true. I just have to remember which equation I’m solving in the moment.”

It doesn’t fix anything.

But for the first time, she stops calling herself weak for wanting us as much as me — and lets “undefined” feel a little less like failure and a little more like room.

Cycle I · “The Hidden Voice” · 23

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