Whispers

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

If you want peace, prepare for war.

No one warned me

that the enemy would memorise my voice.

That it would borrow my face.

That every battle I thought I had survived would return wearing my own thoughts.

There are ghosts that do not haunt houses.

They haunt decisions.

The hand that reaches back.

The apology never deserved.

The hope that refuses to die even after love has.

People think survival ends when the danger leaves.

They have never met the part of the mind that keeps reopening old wounds just to make sure they still hurt.

So I built walls.

Not to keep the world out.

To keep myself from becoming my own betrayal.

Because the darkest prison has no bars.

It has memories that know your name better than you do.

And every morning

they ask the same question:

"Will you bleed for the familiar...

or bury it alive?"

That-

is the war.

The one no medal will ever remember.

The one fought without witnesses.

The one where victory does not feel like triumph.

Only silence.

And if peace ever comes,

it will not arrive like light.

It will arrive

the day the voice inside you stops calling your suffering

home.

They asked me

why I carry storms in my ribs

like something sacred,

why my hands shake

when softness reaches for me

without wanting blood in return.

But no one sees

how grief changes shape over time.

At first, it screams.

Then it becomes ritual.

A quiet thing.

A practiced thing.

A mouth learning how to smile

with ashes behind its teeth.

I learned how to grieve quietly.

How to rot beautifully.

How to stand in a room full of people

with my pulse split open

and still call myself composed.

Because sorrow does not always arrive screaming.

Sometimes it enters like holy music,

slow, devastating, impossible to escape,

until every soft thing begins to hurt.

The sound of laughter in another room.

The outline of a body beside yours.

A name sitting untouched in your throat

like a prayer too ruined to speak aloud.

I loved people

like someone trying to outrun winter,

throwing warmth at every empty room

hoping one of them

would finally feel like home.

Instead,

I became a hallway of almosts.

Almost healed.

Almost held.

Almost enough

for the ones who swore I was everything.

And still,

some unbearable part of me

keeps searching for beauty

inside ruin.

Keeps pressing bruised hands

against the world

as if tenderness alone

could resurrect what was buried.

But people do leave.

And absence is a violent thing.

It unthreads you slowly,

turns memory into a blade

you press deeper into yourself

just to feel them again.

So I made a home inside the ache.

Fed it.

Named it.

Let it grow through my ribs

like black ivy searching for light

that no longer existed.

I have loved like self-destruction before.

Not gently.

Never gently.

I loved with the devotion of a dying cathedral,

all collapsing ceilings and candle smoke,

begging something divine

to remain inside me

after everyone else left.

Now there are nights

where I swear I can feel every ghost

I have ever loved

breathing beneath my skin.

Nights where longing becomes so loud

I mistake it for God.

So if you find me distant now,

understand this:

I am not cold.

I am simply carrying

every version of myself

that never made it out alive.

And I lie awake wondering

if grief is just love

with nowhere left to go,

or if some people

are simply born carrying funerals

inside their bones.

You will not find mercy in me.

I have lain too long beneath the weight of you all.

Above my grave, the living stagger endlessly,

dragging their bodies through years

like prisoners hauling chains through mud.

Every mouth speaks hunger.

Every hand reaches for something

it cannot keep.

You call this living.

I hear you from below.

Your wars vibrate through the soil.

Your grief seeps downward like rainwater.

Your prayers arrive broken-toothed and trembling,

rotting before they ever reach a god.

The earth keeps every sound.

The widow sobbing into tile floors.

The drunk collapsing in the street.

The child learning silence too early.

The lover carving emptiness

into another human body

just to feel less alone.

I know the heaviness of being alive.

I know how existence fastens itself

around the throat.

The body is a cruel attachment.

A cage of appetite and memory.

A machine that begs to survive

even while it is unraveling.

And still you cling to it.

You decorate your suffering.

You perfume decay.

You place flowers over graves

as though petals can soften

what waits beneath them.

But the grave is honest.

The grave does not lie to you.

It does not promise meaning.

It does not ask you to heal.

It only opens its mouth

and teaches stillness.

Down here, there is no ambition.

No shame gnawing holes through the mind.

No love twisted into ownership.

No fear of tomorrow

because tomorrow cannot reach the dead.

Only silence.

Endless and undemanding.

And when death finally unfastens you

from the agony of your own flesh,

it will not feel like terror.

It will feel like release.

Your ribs will loosen first.

Then your breath.

Then every memory stitched violently

into your nervous system

will split apart like wet paper in black water.

The self will collapse after that.

The terrible burden of being someone.

And beyond it,

not judgment.

Only the immense dark

stretching open at last,

vast enough to swallow pain whole.

You will enter it empty-handed.

No name.

No body.

No hunger left inside you.

Only the cold liberty

of becoming nothing

and never suffering again.

I met a serpent in the dark,

moon-pale,

ancient as forgotten prayers,

circling itself beneath a sky that seemed older than the stars.

Its teeth rested in its own tail.

The circle held.

Silent.

Endless.

Like a secret the world had been dreaming since the beginning.

Then a voice rose from somewhere beyond sleep:

I am every ending.

I am every beginning wearing its face.

I watched it swallow

the years I could not forgive,

the names that still echoed,

the ghosts that lingered in the halls of memory.

It devoured them all,

slowly,

reverently,

like offerings laid upon an altar older than language.

And where I expected ruin,

there was only transformation.

Ash became soil.

Grief became wisdom.

The wound became a doorway.

Round and round it turned,

a living halo of becoming,

a crown woven from destruction

and the stubborn refusal to remain broken.

The stars wheeled overhead.

Kingdoms crumbled into dust.

Forests sank into earth and rose again.

Still the circle remained.

Then I understood,

the serpent was not consuming itself.

It was renewing itself.

For nothing truly ends.

The fire becomes smoke.

The smoke becomes sky.

The sky becomes rain.

And the rain remembers the fire.

So the Ouroboros keeps its vigil,

mouth to tail,

death to birth,

darkness to dawn,

turning through ages unseen,

keeping the oldest wisdom in the language of circles:

That sometimes,

to become who you are,

you must be willing

to consume who you were.

She spent years believing she was searching for herself.

As if somewhere beneath the damage, the expectations, the people she had loved, the places she had escaped, and all the versions of herself she had already buried, there was one true woman waiting to be uncovered.

There wasn't.

There was only the woman she kept becoming.

And perhaps that was the secret no one had told her.

You do not find yourself.

You meet yourself, over and over, at different depths.

She had been the frightened girl.

The woman who survived.

The woman who hardened.

The woman who softened again despite having every reason not to.

The skeptic who still prayed.

The cynic who still believed in impossible things.

The one who questioned everything and somehow never lost her capacity for wonder.

She had loved.

She had lost.

She had walked away.

She had stayed too long.

She had mistaken endurance for strength and eventually learned that leaving could be strength too.

There were still things she didn't understand.

About the universe.

About other people.

About herself.

Once, that uncertainty would have frightened her.

Now she smiled at it.

Because a life with nothing left to discover sounded remarkably close to death.

So she stopped demanding answers from every mystery.

Some doors she opened.

Some she walked past.

Some she left slightly ajar, just in case the universe had a sense of humour.

And when someone finally asked her who she had become after everything she had survived, she realised she no longer needed a beautiful answer.

She simply said,

"I'm still finding out".

Then she turned the page.

There was nothing written on the other side.

Not because her story was over.

Because, finally,

the next part belonged entirely to her.

The Moon found the Sun

and something in heaven went wrong.

Not violently.

Quietly.

Light began withdrawing from the earth

as though God had changed His mind.

The birds stopped speaking.

The shadows turned toward themselves.

And every living thing

felt the ancient warning

without knowing its name.

Above us,

the Moon entered the mouth of the Sun.

Black against burning gold.

A dead god

standing before a living one.

And suddenly

every prophecy sounded less like metaphor.

Perhaps this is what the old ones saw

when they carved warnings into stone.

Perhaps they knew

there would come a day

when the two great eyes of heaven

would become one.

When light would kneel before darkness.

When the veil would thin

until something on the other side

could finally look through.

For a moment

the world belonged to neither day nor night.

It belonged to whatever existed

before both.

Something older than worship.

Older than angels.

Older, perhaps,

than the name of God.

And I swear

the darkness felt alive.

Not empty.

Watching.

As if a door had opened

somewhere above us

and the universe was remembering

what humanity had spent centuries

trying to forget.

That we were never promised permanence.

That the earth is only borrowed ground.

That every empire becomes dust.

That every name disappears.

That even the Sun

can be swallowed.

Still...

around the black body of the Moon

the fire remained.

A crown.

A warning.

A halo belonging to something

too terrible to call holy.

And maybe that was the message.

Darkness can cover the light.

It can wound the day.

It can make the whole world

believe the ending has arrived.

But somewhere behind it,

the Sun is still burning.

So if this was an omen,

I do not think it foretold destruction.

I think it foretold

revelation.

The death of what was false.

The collapse of what could no longer remain.

The kind of ending

that arrives carrying

another world inside it.

Because apocalypse

never meant only destruction.

It meant unveiling.

And beneath that impossible sky,

with the Moon wearing the Sun

like a crown of fire,

it almost felt

as though heaven whispered:

Look carefully.

The world you knew is ending.

But the light has not gone anywhere.

There is a garden inside me,

but it does not let me leave.

The hedges lean inward,

their thorns shifting to breathe against my skin.

Roots slide beneath the soil

to erase the proof I ever tried to escape.

Every path is a deception.

Turn left and the ground softens to swallow,

turn right and the air thickens

until I’m choking on the stench of flowers

that bloom only to conceal the exits,

snapping their black-veined petals shut

when my eyes linger too long.

In the undergrowth,

something with too many teeth

feasts on the bones of things I used to love.

The storm waits in silence.

It clings to the branches,

gathering weight,

breathing on the back of my neck.

It begins as a doubt,

a tremor in the chest,

then splits the sky until rain cuts like glass,

until mud grips my legs,

until I forget which way was forward

and which was home.

I have found gates before,

bars bleeding rust,

a gap just wide enough for hope to slip through.

But the vines are always faster.

They lash around my arms,

drive their thorns into my wrists,

and speak in the voice I keep buried in my skull:

Where could you possibly go?

No one is waiting.

From the outside,

it is beautiful,

walls of green, soft blossoms,

a carefully staged lie.

But inside, the walls shift when you blink,

and the only way to survive

is to stop believing in escape.

Would you fight for me, if the skies bled red?

If the stars went silent and the sun played dead?

If the heavens cracked and the light turned vile,

Would you walk through fire just to stay a while?

If the world turned cruel and the winds bit deep,

Would you hold the line while the lost ones weep?

Would you bear the dark, the dread, the cold,

Stand by my ruin, unshaken, bold?

I don’t want vows or silver lies,

Just a truth that scorches, that never dies.

So tell me now, don’t dress it sweet:

Would you fight for love

when it tastes like defeat?

Tear through fate with bloodied hands,

Break each chain the gods command?

Face the storm, the void, the flame,

drag me back, still screaming my name?

They say love fades, like breath in frost,

Would you chase me through all I lost?

Where time forgets and shadows sing,

Would you find me

where even death clings?

Don’t come soft. Don’t come clean.

Come raw, haunted, obscene, not love that bends to light,

I need the kind

that stays

when it bites.

In the quiet future,

when the house has learned to live without them,

the bedsheets will still ache.

Morning will crawl back through the window,

a thin gold pulse spilling across the linen,

and suddenly the air will flicker,

as if the sun itself remembers where it once lingered.

Dust will float like ash,

catching on the ghost of a sigh.

At night, the moon will come searching,

pouring through the same glass,

silver light cutting over the hollow where his body lay,

finding the outline her warmth left behind.

Even the shadows will shift closer,

as if trying to listen.

And the orchids, brittle now, scent long faded,

will bloom again for an instant,

their fragrance rising from nowhere,

sweet and impossible,

like a memory trying to take shape.

Then, the room will breathe.

A ripple through the sheets,

the faint echo of skin against skin.

Threads stretching, whispering,

as if love were not gone but sleeping.

Even time cannot wash that away.

For when moonlight falls again through the open window,

and orchids bloom somewhere unseen,

the bedsheets will stir softly,

as if remembering how to breathe,

and murmur into the dark,

we remember the shape of love.

I wore your name like a crown of salt.

Each time I cried,

I baptized myself in the wound.

I learned reverence from damage,

how to kneel without a god.

Your absence carved scripture into me,

every verse a fresh opening.

My mouth became rot and prayer,

my tongue,

a disciplined blade.

I blessed what split me open,

called ruin devotion.

When the salt failed,

I bled to keep believing,

crowning myself, again and again,

with the name that never chose me.