I fell like silence breaking,
a scream that never made it out,
the wind folding around me
like arms that never did.

Now, I wake in a room
stitched with wires and cold light,
where the air tastes of bleach
and every surface hums with life
that isn’t mine.

The machine speak in beeps
soft, exact, unfeeling.
Beep.
I’m still here.
Beep.
I failed.
Beep.
I failed.

They say the sound is good.
They say the beeping means I’m stable.
But it only reminds me
that death didn’t want me.
That earth opened its arms
and still let me go.

The noise wraps around my head
like a shroud of neon thread.
It winds through the hollow
in my chest,
settling where the fall had emptied me.

I hate its voice,
its small, insistent hope.
It has no right to be so calm
when everything inside me
is still falling.

I close my eyes,
but there’s no peace.
Just the beep,
beep,
beep,
dragging me back
from the edge I chose.

And I want to ask the silence
why it let me go.
Why it handed me back
to this world of white and wires,
to these strangers with clipped voices
and pity in their eyes.

But silence won’t speak here.
Only the machines do.

Beep.
I’m still alive.
Beep.
I’m still alive.
Beep.
God, why?