“Everybody wants to judge, but nobody wants to listen.”

Abdullah leaned against the bus stop bench, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his oversized jacket, feeling the weight of everyone’s eyes on him. They didn’t even try to hide it. The whispers, the sideways glances—they were all so predictable. He could almost hear what they were saying: Another one of those guys, too much of a coward to face up to life. He could feel the judgment on his skin, as sharp and cold as the autumn wind.

It was a strange thing, how people could act like they knew you. Like they understood the shape of your heart just by the way you looked. Abdullah had stopped trying to explain himself a long time ago. He had his reasons for being here, for walking with his head down and his shoulders hunched. It wasn’t like it was anyone’s business. But, in this city, everything was everybody’s business. Even when it came to men like him.

The news had spread. Some of it was true, some of it was just convenient fiction. Abdullah had been struggling—no, suffocating—for months now. And no one could see the invisible chains, the ones that tightened every time he tried to take a full breath. A coward, they’d call him. Unmanly. He had heard it all before. He knew exactly what they thought.

But no one wanted to ask why. No one cared enough to understand that the weight wasn’t something you just shrugged off. No, they just passed him by, their judgments flying like darts, each one a little deeper than the last. Nobody stopped to see the exhaustion in his eyes, the tiredness that didn’t come from sleepless nights or late shifts, but from the constant fight to stay.

The bus arrived, and Abdullah stepped aboard without looking anyone in the eye. He found a seat in the back, far from anyone who might try to talk to him. He’d heard it all. He didn’t need another lecture from some well-meaning stranger who only saw the surface.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want help. It was that nobody understood. How could they?

The bus lurched forward, pulling him further away from that place—further away from everyone’s opinions, their scorn. But even then, Abdullah knew there would be more. There always was. There was no escape from the world they made for men like him.