Surrounded by Nothing, You At Last Find Solitude

The skin peels in ribbons, curling like the pages of unwritten regrets,
unfolding where the fingers once traced warmth on cold glass,
a silent fog of breath lingering, dissolving into absence.
The house is empty now—
or perhaps, it was never full,
only a place where shadows learned to walk without sound,
where voices whisper backwards, syllables twisting like snapped necks.

A clock ticks without hands, bleeding minutes into the floorboards.
A rat scurries through the hollowed-out ribcage of something forgotten,
gnawing on the marrow of lost time, crunching through brittle echoes.
It does not see me.
Nothing sees me.

I once was a mouth, hungry for the taste of warmth,
now I am an orifice for the void,
a breathing wound that inhales the silence of tombstones
and exhales the dust of abandoned names.

A mirror reflects nothing but hunger,
cheeks hollowed by famine, eyes blackened by the weight of waking,
hands that grasp at the edges of something real—
but it slithers away, leaving only the aftertaste of rot.
I eat the air and choke on the taste of my own absence.

The walls whisper secrets in tongues of mold,
prayers written in the language of decay.
I read them with my fingertips,
tracing the lines where the house has begun to bleed.
It opens its wounds to me.
It loves me.

The bones of the world creak beneath my feet,
splintering beneath the pressure of knowing,
of seeing too much, of understanding the futility of flesh.
I peel away another layer, another mask of sinew and pretense,
until only the skeleton of my soul remains,
grinning, grinning, grinning.

There is laughter here, buried beneath the floor,
gurgling from throats that no longer breathe,
rattling against the coffin-lids of sanity.
I press my ear to the boards and listen,
but the voices speak in tongues my mind has long since discarded.

I step outside, but the world is only a vast, empty throat,
swallowing me in gulps of shadow and dust.
The stars have collapsed into themselves,
a cemetery of light in the corpse of the sky.

There is nothing left.
Nothing but me.

And at last, I am alone.