Reputation
In the house where your sadness is a nuisance and your anger a silence nobody bothers to acknowledge, the currency of belonging is not honesty but performance. A bright laugh that rang a little too early, a clever remark that landed before the conversation had fully formed, a face that seemed to glow with genuine pleasure at your arrival—these are the tokens that bought you a seat at the table. The moment you cross the threshold, the walls already know the script you are supposed to follow; they measure you by the sparkle of your entrance, not by the weight of the stories you carry beneath it. The rule is simple: first impressions matters more than the tangled truths that linger in the corridors of your mind. A reputation, in that environment, is a story told by other people—a montage of snapshots that never quite captured the pauses, the sighs, the moments when the mask slipped. And once the story left the mouths of the gossiping guests, you no longer hold the ...
