Born
Hollow

You were born with a hole in your chest. Not a wound — there is no blood, no ache you could point a doctor toward. Just a small, patient absence behind the sternum, about the size of a held breath.

It doesn't hurt. It only hums — a low draft that rises in the quiet hours, when the noise drops and there is nothing left between you and the plain fact of it: something is missing, and you have never once been able to name it.

So you do the natural thing. You try to fill it. Everyone does — it is the first project of being alive, and almost no one calls it by its name:

Each one fits — for a night, a season, a honeymoon. Then the level drops, the hum returns, and your hand goes looking for the next thing to pour.

Here is the part nobody warns you about: the hollow has no floor. It keeps the cruelest property of a black hole — whatever you drop in slips past the edge and is simply gone, and the center sits exactly as empty as before. Fill the whole room around you and the quiet at that center only grows louder; the more you gather, the more there is to fall in and lose.

And we have read it this way our whole lives — a black hole in the chest, a collapse, a flaw in how we were built. So we shop, in every aisle there is, for the one piece that might finally fill it. But you cannot feed a black hole full. There is no piece. It was never a container at all.

But collapse is not the only thing an emptiness can do. Stop, for a second, and look at the things that make music. The flute. The bell. The open body of a guitar. Not one of them is solid. Every instrument is built around a hollow — and the hollow is not the flaw in the instrument. The hollow is the instrument.

Sound is just the shape a body makes out of its own emptiness. Pack the guitar full — fill it, finally, completely — and you do not get a richer instrument. You get a quiet box.

Which means the hollow was never waiting to be filled. It was waiting to be played. It is the reason you reach at all — for a melody, for another hand, for work that costs you something, for the next ridge of the horizon. A chest with no hollow would want for nothing, make nothing, and never once be moved.

The hum you have been trying to silence is only the hollow doing what it is for. The same opening that aches in the quiet is the one that lets the music in — every song, every face, every morning you didn't expect. The draft was never a leak. It was a door, and it has been standing open the whole time.