i breathe like it’s a sin and sleep like it’s penance and wake up every day to remember that i am still here and that is the only thing i have left

for the first time in centuries or minutes or maybe not at all i cannot find a beautiful way to say it i used to twist thoughts into something golden like thread pulled from open wounds something worth bleeding for something worth giving to strangers who didn’t ask for it but held it anyway like it was sacred now everything i touch goes still. i haven’t written in months not because the thoughts left but because it became shapeless because the words slid off my skin like oil like shadows like rot i don’t know how to explain the kind of silence that burns through you slow like a fever like a body left in the sun

i was dying and no one noticed or maybe i wasn’t dying just unraveling in slow motion slipping into cracks between days teeth clenched jaw wired shut and no one asked because i smiled the kind of smile they put on corpses in coffins to make it easier for the family

there’s nothing stopping me from dying and that is the most terrifying thing i have ever known more frightening than the dark more frightening than being seen because it means that staying alive is a choice and i am choosing it without wanting to not out of hope but out of inertia out of habit out of the cruel machinery of survival and i hate myself for it

i thought the story would end earlier than this before it got this ugly before i rotted through before i had to face the fact that i am not a hero not a martyr just a soft stupid thing that keeps breathing even when it doesn’t want to i thought i’d be a tragedy not a slow decay i thought there would be flames or fanfare or at least some poetry in it but it’s just me and the dust and the empty places where people used to be and the way my voice echoes when i speak into my own ribs

and i hate it

i hate it more than death itself