Losers

The gym smells like sweat and cheap nachos.

My shoes squeak against the waxed floor,

a sound swallowed by a crowd 

I’m swallowed by but not a member of.

Someone laughs—

not at a joke I made, not with me,

but in that way, that turns skin to static.

I stand at the edge of something—

the cafeteria, the parking lot,

a joke I almost told.

Hands in pockets, hoodie pulled low,

practicing invisibility like second nature.

The winners move with easy certainty,

golden, effortless, gleaming with belonging.

I am background noise,

a smudged name in the margins.

Years press forward, and the golden ones fade,

their edges dulled by time, by sameness,

while the smudged names rewrite the pages.

Losers, they called us.

But losers are just unseen,

waiting for the right time to look up,

for the right moment to sharpen into focus.

And when the world tilts,

when the needle finds the groove—

we are no longer static.

We are the sound that fills the room.

s.g.