The world is full of places that once held voiced,
Now only dust.
Windows stare empty,
Glass long shattered,
Yet you can almost hear the echo of laughter,
The hum of a life that used to exist there.

Chairs still wait at tables for meals never served.
Curtains hang like ghosts.
Breathing with the wind.
Paint peels like forgotten skin,
Walls hold secrets they will never tell.

Abandoned places are not empty.
They are heavy weighted with memories,
With footsteps that linger,
With stories cut short.

We call them ruins,
But they are more like mirrors
reminding us that nothing we built
lasts forever.
And everything we leave behind
becomes a monument
to how quickly we vanish.

I tell myself I’m fine because I’m moving.
I wake up,
I shower,
I show up to school with the right words,
The practiced smile.
I laugh hard enough to pass the test.
But the truth is quieter.

I dissociate in the shower,
Watch the water slip from my hands like time I can’t touch.
I sit on the edge of my bed after waking up,
Staring at the floor as if it might tell me how to keep going.

I scroll at night,
Thumb aching,
Mind empty,
Searching for nothing but distraction from everything.

It’s not laziness.
It’s not disinterest.
This half-alive state where I can still perform but every step costs more than I have.

That’s why I’m exhausted.
That’s why I can be so social at school yet let every message rot unanswered once I’m home.

I am not cold.
I am not careless.
I am frozen moving just enough to look alive.
While inside,
I am standing still.

We draw lines in the sand,
On maps,
On walks,
On hearts.
Lines that tell us who belongs,
And who doenst.
Lines that turn neighbours into strangers,
Friends into foes.

We call them borders,
Boundaries,
Nations,
Rules.
As if paper and paint could hold back rivers,
Winds,
Or the puls of a living world.

But the earth doesn’t care.
A bird crosses them without through,
The ocean swallows them whole.
Only we insist on dividing what is meant to flow.
And still,
We fight,
Still we guard our invincible fences,
Forgetting that humanity is not a grid of lines but a shared breath,
A common pulse,
A single home.

What if we erased them?
What if we stopped pretending that lines could make sense of life,
And finally remember that de belong to each other first?

You wish for what cannot be,
For doors that will never open,
For hands that will never hold yours.
You trace the edges of a dream that slips like water through your fingers,
And every heartbeat stretches into a quiet ache you cannot name.

Hope blooms in your chest like a fragile flower in winter soil.
Beautiful,
Stubborn,
And destined to wither.

Every “what if” is a small knife,
Twisting just enough to remind you that reality does not bend for longing.
And yet you reach,
Again and again,
As if the hurt were proof of life itself,
Forgetting that some stars cannot be caught,
Some rivers cannot be turned.

Wishing for the impossible does not make you brave.
It leaves you raw,
Tender to the world,
Bleeding quietly
For something
That was never yours to hold.

There’s something in me that I cannot name,
A quiet pulse beneath my ribs that huls the wrong note in every brat of my heart.

It moves with me,
Breathed with me,
A shadow switched into my skin that no light can touch,
No words can capture,
No one can see.

It whispers in mirrors,
Tugs at my reflection,
Makes familiar faces look foreign,
Makes my own hands feel like strangers.
I cannot show it,
Cannot speak it,
Cannot explain why the world sometimes feels heavy,
Why laughter tastes hollow,
Why silence cuts deeper than noice.

And still I carry it.
Still,
I walk,
Still,
I smile,
Still,
I try to be whole with a shadow that refuses to leave.

Perhaps one day,
I’ll learn its name,
Or perhaps I’ll walk
My whole life
With a companion
I never chose,
Never wanted,
But cannot escape.

Every time you reach back for a memory,
You think you’re replaying a tape.
But it isn’t a tape it’s wet clay in your hands,
Reshaped the moment you touch it.
Your first kiss,
The fight that broke you,
The day you swore you’d never forget.

They’re all ghosts you’ve rewritten,
Paintings smeared by each glance.
What you’ve told yourself so many times you’ve forgotten the original script.
You can no longer tell where the real ends and the lie begins.

The past you swear by,
The moments you’d die to defend,
They may never have happened the way you remember.

Memory is not a photograph.
It’s a rumour your brain repeats until even you believe it.

If your own memories are lies we can’t untangle,
Then what,
If anything,
Is truly real?

Even the brightest things are born in shadow.
A star does not glow without the night to hold it.

Do why do we curse the dark as if it is only enemy?
It is the canvas,
the contrast,
the reason we see the light at all.

Your struggles,
The nights you think swallow you whole are not proof of weakness,
But proof that you too are becoming something that can burn through the void.

Even the stars,
Those endless fires,
Need darkness
To be seen.
And so do you.