Tears

The Cataclysm Inside My Skin

It begins when the silence thickens—
Not quiet, but suffocation—
The kind that coils through your veins like smoke and strangles you from the inside.
My soul buckles, a cathedral of bone collapsing under the weight of itself.
I am not drowning in tears;
I am drowning in the space between them,
Where the grief calcifies, ossifies, sharpens into a weapon I can’t wield.
Do you know what it means to drown in dry air?
To suffocate on the very breath that keeps you alive?

There are no flames here—
Only the cold ash of a body spent.
I am an artifact of something that once burned too bright,
Now hollow, brittle, crumbling with every step.
No, I will not scream—
For if I did, it would tear the very fabric of this world,
Shatter the fragile lie that is my existence.
What remains of me is too small to be seen,
And too dangerous to be exposed.

Do not mistake this for survival.
I am a mausoleum, a tomb for the heart that once beat inside me,
And I have buried it so deep in the marrow of my bones
That even I have forgotten how to find it.
But still, my mind commands, my tongue obeys,
Spitting out the remnants of someone else’s truth—
A ghost inhabiting this shell of sinew and skin.
I am a ventriloquist of my own destruction,
And I speak in the language of absence.

Fatigue? No.
This is not weariness, this is annihilation.
This is the aftermath of a war fought in secret,
Where every night I wage battle against the dark,
And every morning I rise from the wreckage, only to fall again.
Do you know the cost of existing,
Of holding yourself together when every fiber of you screams to unravel?
I would peel the skin from my bones
If it meant I could escape this prison of expectation,
This human-shaped armor that suffocates more than it shields.

Do not tell me I am bruised—
I am undone.
I am the aftermath of a star’s death,
A nebula of broken atoms scattered across a sky too vast to care.
Leave me here, in this ruin.
Do not gather my fragments, for they are sacred in their destruction,
The only testament to the fact that I was ever whole.
I do not need your hands.
I do not need to be fixed.

Look at me—
Do your eyes understand what they see?
Do they know the abyss I carry,
How far it stretches, how deep it consumes?
I have fallen not from grace but from memory,
And every day I wake to the echo of my own disappearance.
I do not fear the fall—
I fear that I will land and be forced to keep breathing,
To endure the crash without shattering.

But in the end, it’s not the fall that kills me.
It is the forgetting.
It is when I raise my head and the pain recedes,
When the fire fades, and the agony blurs into a distant hum.
I will forget,
And that is the greatest cruelty.
For in forgetting, I am erased.
In forgetting, I lose even the wounds that defined me,
And I am left with nothing but a phantom ache
Where my heart once burned.

Memory is a traitor, a thief of the soul.
It lets you believe the pain is gone,
But it leaves you hollow,
With no scar to remind you that you were once alive.
And that is the final horror—
Not the suffering, but the erasure of it.
For when the memory fades, so too does the proof
That I ever was.