2025 winner

2025: When No One's Watching, Aeman Abbasi

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Who are you when no one’s watching?

 

What do you do when your mind is your enemy? I ask myself quietly as I lay on the floor beside my balcony door, still wearing the dress from tonight’s event. The city lights bloom beyond the glass, indifferent. I stub out my twelfth cigarette, counting because numbers stay still when I don’t. I reach for the bottle of wine and catch my reflection in the door. Black mascara has bled beneath my eyes, mapping every place I lost control. I look like someone who believed something might happen and had to learn, publicly, that it wouldn’t.

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In my head, the night had gone differently. It always does.

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In my head, when I finally ran into him, he recognized me; not as someone interrupting his evening, but as someone worth stopping for. In reality, he barely slowed. His eyes slid past me, distant, correcting me without a word, as if I had mistaken familiarity for permission. By the time my mind caught up, my body had already offered too much. In my head, I am careful. I rehearse conversations like choreography; every step placed, every pause intentional. In real life, the music starts early, and my body moves without me. By the time my mind catches up, the room has already changed.

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Back on the floor, the silence feels corrective. My mind replays the moment, not to understand it, but to contain it; rehearsing restraint like a survival skill. I imagine a smaller version of myself, one who knows when to stop before being stopped. I am fluent in my language. I know how sentences are meant to land. But when I speak, they don’t wait their turn. Words crowd each other, spill forward, grow louder, as if urgency could substitute for timing. I hear myself over-explaining, over-reaching, trying to outrun the silence before it corrects me. By the time I stop, I’ve said more than I meant, and less than I wanted.

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There is more happening inside me than you can see; thought arriving first, careful and well-intended, before action can keep up. From the outside, it looks impulsive, something to laugh at or correct. Inside, it is an effort to be kind, to be friendly, to belong. This has been happening for a while. My mind invents versions of me it believes the world will accept; confident, effortless, easy to place. Some would call it dopamine. Others might call it a coping mechanism. To me, it feels like rehearsal. When I approached him, it wasn’t recklessness that moved me; it was a story my mind had practiced until it felt safe enough to believe. It had happened again. One more time.

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Rejection has shaped the state I’m in now, but it has not broken me. I carry the marks of it, not all of them visible. Conversations that didn’t continue. Laughter that arrived a beat too late. The subtle shift of embarrassment when I entered a room. These are the quiet scars left by misunderstanding, by people unsure how to stand beside someone who doesn’t move the way they expect. The mistake isn’t that I act; it’s that people only see the action. They don’t see the care that arrived first, or the version of me that wanted nothing more complicated than connection. If they looked longer, they might recognize her; not as a disruption but as someone reaching.

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When no one’s watching, I trace those scars without reopening them. I learn where they came from and what they cost. I don’t confuse them with who I am. I am still here thinking carefully, reaching anyway. Carrying more care than most people ever notice, and more resilience than they will ever need to name.

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Eventually, I get up.

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I carry the glass of wine into the bathroom and set it on the counter. Under the light, my face looks unfamiliar; too exposed, too exact. I turn on the sink and splash water over my cheeks. The mascara loosens, then runs, dark lines breaking apart before disappearing down the drain.

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I dry my face and look again.

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Without it, I look more like myself. Not smaller, just quieter. A face that doesn’t need to perform to be understood.

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I leave the light on when I walk away.