Echoes
These are not explanations.
They are what comes after the silence.
If I had to describe it to you,
I wouldn't start with joy.
I'd start with the weight,
the quiet, constant knowing
that you are here,
and there is no stepping outside of it.
To be human is to wake
already burdened with something
you never agreed to carry.
It is hunger,
not just for food,
but for touch,
for meaning,
for someone to look at you and say
you are not alone in this.
It is joy,
sudden, irrational,
arriving like it owns you.
A laugh that escapes your control.
a moment so full
it erases the edges of your body.
And then,
it vanishes.
Leaving you holding
the hollow it carved out.
It is grief,
not always loud,
not always visible,
but relentless.
It embeds itself in the body,
in the chest,
in the space between breaths.
It teaches you
how something can be gone
and still consume you.
It is anger,
sharp, electric,
sometimes sacred,
sometimes ruinous.
It rises when something in
you says
this is wrong,
or
this is not enough,
or
I have been hurt and I refuse
to disappear quietly.
Sometimes it shields you.
Sometimes it scorches
everything in reach,
including what you needed
to keep.
It is love,
the most dangerous of all.
Because it strips you open.
Because it makes you visible.
Because it places pieces of you
into someone else's hands
and asks them not to break them.
Sometimes they don't.
Sometimes they do.
And still,
you offer yourself again.
It is fear,
quiet or consuming,
rational or feral.
The fear of loss,
of failure,
of being seen too clearly,
or not seen at all.
The fear that you will never become
who you thought you might be.
The fear that you already have.
It is numbness,
the absence of feeling
that comes when feeling
becomes unbearable.
A silence where everything dulls,
where even pain feels distant,
and you begin to question
if this is peace
or just another form of vanishing.
It is contradiction.
Wanting closeness
and pushing it away.
Wanting change
and clinging to what wounds you.
Knowing what is right for you
and walking straight into the
opposite anyway.
You are not one thing.
You were never meant to be.
It is time,
moving with or without your consent.
It is watching yourself become
someone you didn't plan for,
someone your past self would
not recognise.
and learning to exist with that.
It is small things.
A cup of coffee.
A song that understands you
better than people ever could.
The way light falls across a room
and convinces you, briefly,
that you are safe.
It is everything at once.
Pain and beauty
coexisting
without cancelling each other out.
You can be shattered
and still function.
You can be happy
and still afraid.
You can be loved
and still feel profoundly alone.
To be human
is to feel too much,
go numb,
and then feel again.
Over and over.
And if I had to leave you with
one truth.
You will never fully understand it
while you are inside it.
But you will feel it.
Constantly.
Inescapably.
Beautifully.
Brutally.
And that,
more than anything,
is what it means
to be alive.
In Someone Else’s Mouth
Ever wonder if someone else is
telling your story,
editing your sins into something
easier to swallow,
dressing your wounds like stage
props,
softening the screams into
something almost beautiful?
Trimming the silence where you
broke,
so it doesn't linger too long in
their telling.
I think about it
when memories don't feel like
mine anymore,
when the past sounds cleaner
in someone else's mouth.
When their version of me
fits together better than I ever
did.
Maybe I was crueler than I
remember.
Maybe I was kinder.
Maybe I was never the thing I
claim to be
at all.
Maybe I'm just the aftermath
of what they chose to keep.
There are ghosts in the narrative,
versions of me that never agreed
to be rewritten.
They knock against my ribs
sometimes,
like they're still trying to be
heard.
And somewhere,
in a voice that isn't mine,
I am either the villain
or the miracle.
Something exaggerated,
something simplified,
something easier to explain.
BUT NEVER JUST HUMAN!
Who Comes Next
THE PRIVILEGE OF A LIFETIME
is to become who you truly are.
Not the version
that learned how to be loved.
Not the one fear built
to keep you safe.
Not the acceptable shape
you carved yourself into
so the world would let you stay.
There comes a point
when survival becomes its own kind of prison.
When the masks that once protected you
begin suffocating the face beneath them.
And becoming yourself
requires something almost violent.
You have to disappoint people.
Outgrow rooms
you once begged to enter.
Question truths
you inherited before you were old enough
to choose them.
You have to stand among the ruins
of every identity that kept you alive
and resist the instinct
to rebuild it.
Because somewhere beneath
the expectations,
the fear,
the borrowed voices,
and all the versions of you
created for somebody else's comfort,
there is no finished person
waiting to be discovered.
There is only you,
finally free enough
to decide who comes next.
AFTER THE APPLAUSE
Somewhere in me, she still dances,
barefoot, bruised, and buried in silence.
The world forgot her music,
but her spine remembers.
Each flinch, a skipped note in a dying symphony.
Each silence, the hush before a fallen crescendo.
Now she stands mid-twirl, cracked at the knee,
a relic of movement trapped in bone.
A statue in a burned-out theatre,
grace fossilised, applause long dead.
SPLIT
“You should’ve drowned with the rest of the past,”
says the one behind the polished glass.
“You drag your filth through every day,
a stain I scrub, but you still stay.”
“I kept us breathing,” the shadow spits.
“You faked the light. I took the hits.
You smiled through blood and called it grace.
I buried pain you dared not face.”
“You ruin every hand that holds.”
“I bite because you break. You fold.”
“You want to be the ache, the scar”
“I am the reason we got this far.”
They stare through me. They do not see.
But both still speak. And both are me.
One wants peace. The other, proof.
And I live trembling between the truth
of who I was
and what I’ll lose
when silence finally picks a side.
SCENE NOTES
I saw my own blood
from across the floor,
dark and deliberate,
moving without me,
like proof
that something inside me
had already left.
I saw false love
wear real faces,
mouths shaped like absolution,
hands soft as prayer,
eyes bright with promise
but hollow.
All of it ash.
They spoke like oracles
and touched like ghosts.
Nothing stayed.
Nothing held.
That was the first lesson:
not everything that kneels
is faithful.
Some things only learn your shape
so they can leave it hollowed
when they’re done.
That’s how they survive.
They leave
with pieces of you.
THE MISSING RIB
There is a house
my bones ache to remember,
though I have never
stood beneath its grieving roof.
Its walls are built of silences
that hum in my marrow,
its windows shaped
like the absences love forgot to name.
I’ve never seen its door,
but I’ve heard it
swing open in dreams,
the wind saying my name
like a mother who never got the chance.
I search for it
in the breath between songs,
in the pause before someone leaves,
in the way strangers look away
just when they feel familiar.
It is not a place.
It is the missing rib,
the echo of a language
my soul was fluent in
before I was born.
And still,
I walk the world barefoot,
each step
a prayer
to be taken home.
Somewhere inside me,
a door remains unanswered.
And every time I dream,
I knock.
BELLS FOR THE SLAUGHTER
Forgive me,
I keep dropping the halo
for the punchline.
They wanted a muse.
Soft hands. Light.
I brought bells.
I make them laugh
so they don’t see me
slipping out the door.
If this is a costume,
why am I dressed for slaughter
stitched from bells
and bite marks?
The stage lights bleach everything tender.
Up there,
even a prayer sounds like a joke.
So I bow.
Smile.
Take the noise they give me.
By the time the curtain falls,
I’m already gone.
Still clapping.
Still laughing.
No one checks
where the fool went.
“If time is anything akin to God,
then memory must be the devil.”
Because time only watches.
It stands far away,
cold and merciless,
hands folded behind its back
while everything you love collapses.
Time doesn’t touch you.
Memory does.
Memory breaks in through unlocked doors.
Tracks mud across the carpet of your healing.
Sleeps in your bed like it owns the place.
It doesn’t knock.
It claws.
It digs its fingers into my ribs
and pries them open like a gate.
It says,
Look.
Look at the night you begged.
Look at the mouth that lied.
Look at the version of you who still believed in forever.
It doesn’t show me gently.
It shoves my face into it.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Time says: it’s over.
Memory says: feel it like it’s happening now.
And suddenly my lungs forget how to work.
My pulse becomes a siren.
My chest is an autopsy table.
Because memory doesn’t remember,
it recreates.
Same smell.
Same voice.
Same knife.
It doesn’t haunt like a ghost.
It hunts.
It knows exactly where the heart is
and how to reach inside
without killing you,
just enough
to make sure you keep living with it missing.
Because it refuses salvation.
Because it won’t let the dead stay buried.
Because it keeps resurrecting ghosts
just to watch me kneel.
If time is God,
memory is heresy.
If time forgives,
memory keeps receipts written in blood.
And maybe that’s why healing
feels less like prayer
and more like an exorcism,
me on the floor,
shaking,
trying to spit your name out of my mouth
like smoke,
like poison,
like something that was never meant to live inside me.
ALMOST AT DUSK
Love me like a myth:
unproven, impossible,
yet prayed to
by those who should know better.
I’ll be the rumour your bones repeat,
the fire no historian can date,
the soft lie folded into lullabies,
the scar the map refuses to name.
Carve me into the mouths of rivers,
let sailors argue if I was ever real,
teach your children my crooked anthem,
swear you saw me once, almost, at dusk.
