Slow.
Entangling.
Rot wears the face of patience.
Silence gathered like rust.
Endurance cracked quietly.
Decay entered silently and made itself a home.
Dust fell into every sacred thing.
The ashtray overflowed beside untouched flowers.
The garden party continued.
Birthdays,
rolling in faster every year,
dragging their long shadows behind them.
Something terrible
always circles back.
The innocence fled early,
left me sleepless
in a cold room of memories turned nightmares.
I still hear younger laughter
through half-lit hallways, like ghosts through another house—
sugar-stained fingers, small hands,
bright candles,
warm lights in winter windows.
The world untouched by dread.
Time bruises in unknowing ways.
Memory decays softly.
Now I grow flowers alone,
watering them with versions of myself I no longer recognize.
No candles to burn.
Only silence waiting in the walls.
Getting older
feels like watching winter
move into the bones.
I spent years
waiting for grief
to come roaring back through the door.
Instead it learned to sit beside me.
Never gone,
only softer now,
lingering like an old friend waiting across the table.
The years no longer howl
like they used to.
Light returns slowly,
through the kitchen windows,
laying gold across unwashed dishes
and half-watered plants.
Half-warm coffee.
Rain against the garden.
The cat asleep nearby.
My name resting safely in my own hands.
The light asks nothing of me.
There are still nights
where memory returns like weather,
slow thunder in the bones,
old wounds opening their tired mouths—
but it passes.
I no longer confuse peace with emptiness.
No one tells you,
how strange it feels
when your life finally stops hurting.
How silence itself
can make you weep.
Some wounds never vanish.
They simply loosen their grip.
The world grows around it.
Now the winters arrive gently.
Not as punishment—
just another season passing through.
I am made of bone
and a restless mind.
Coffee gone cold.
Cigarette to ash.
Watching the world
pass
without me.
I got too good at goodbyes.
Left pieces of myself
in every one.
Something in me
didn’t survive them.
Now I find my own way
through what’s left of me.
The will to go on
slowly fades.
Trapped inside your body.
The void deepens—
obsidian.
Demons closing in,
tasting the win.
And you—
blade in hand—
turn inward.
I stayed standing
Not steady—
Just enough
to pass as strength.
Bending quietly.
Hands shaking.
Mind slipping—
just enough to lose hold.
No one noticed
how close I was.
I take my intrusive thoughts
out for walks—
like they belong to me.
They don’t leave.
They don’t quiet.
I try to sleep them off,
but they follow me there too.
Every night,
the same loop—
no exit.
I remember every word
that cut me open.
I remember every fire
that left more
than it burned.
I remember the void
that kept growing
until there was nothing else.
I remember the storm
that almost took me—
almost.
I remember every hit,
every mark.
every scar—
inside
and out.
In my trenches–
this haunted house
eats me whole.
Ghosts of memory
wander.
Whispers in the walls.
My mind—
a forbidden dungeon
no one enters.
Something inside
won’t stay still.
Dead eyes.
On the floor again.
My grief taught me discipline.
Not the clean, motivational kind—
the quiet, brutal kind.
that holds you together
when everything you love comes undone.
The discipline of surviving
what should have broken you.
Grief carved the truth in front of me—
the pause before collapse.
Tears taught me
what words never could.
My peace arrived—
honest, not gentle.
Now I honour the scars that taught me—
the ones that closed without permission,
that carried wisdom into my skin
and proved I was worth healing.
I let go of what no longer serves me.
I stand in the truth of my heart
and the marrow of my soul.
I learned early—
nothing leaves clean.
Not grief.
Not love.
Not the versions of you
you had to bury to survive.
Fallen tears.
Coffee stains.
Sunlight
cracks through the window—
soft,
but unforgiving.
Heaven—
a state of mind.
Hell
lives deep in the heart.
Smoke without fire.
Footsteps that don’t return.
And something in you
still counting the dead.
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