what it means to be alive

I didn’t fall, I settled.

I sank the way ash sinks, slow and without protest,

until I couldn’t remember being fire.

I didn’t notice when I began to die.

There was no wound, no horror to point at,

just a quiet shift in the machinery behind my ribs,

a soft grinding down of gears that no one heard.

Hope didn’t leave me.

It stayed, and rotted,

a dead bird in the attic of my chest,

I can still smell it when I try to dream.

Dreams don’t die like people do.

They spoil.

Go sour like meat left too long in a warm room.

You can still eat them,

but they make something inside you sick.

I remember being full once,

full of hunger, of wanting, of motion.

But then came the long corridor of days,

each one a copy of the last,

a grey factory line of empty hours.

Every day I woke and fed the void a little more of myself:

a plan here, a promise there,

a thought I once believed in.

I handed it over like spare change,

quietly, politely, ashamed of how easy it was

to betray the person I swore I’d become.

Nothing dramatic happened.

That was the horror.

I just grew used to the feeling

that nothing in the world was meant for me,

not love, not greatness, not even ruin.

Just… maintenance.

A slow custodial sentence inside this body.

And purpose,

purpose didn’t shatter.

It thinned.

Like smoke leaving a mouth.

Like breath leaving a body no one bothered to bury.

I tried to blame school, God, circumstance,

the dull gravity of surviving,

but I know the truth:

I withered from the inside first.

My own hands did the quiet killing.

I learned how to lie by smiling.

I learned how to disappear while still being seen.

I learned that if you starve yourself of meaning long enough,

you can live off of routine alone,

like a parasite feeding on its own blood.

People talk about death like it arrives.

It doesn’t.

It accumulates.

It builds up under the fingernails,

behind the teeth, inside the thoughts you don’t say aloud.

Then one day, you feel nothing at all

and realize:

this isn’t numbness,

this is who you are now.

Now I wake out of habit.

I speak out of habit.

I breathe out of habit.

Nothing moves behind my eyes.

My future isn’t gone,

it just never arrives.

I am not waiting to die.

I am already inside the afterlife,

If there is a hell,

I think it looks exactly like this,

a life still technically happening

long after the soul has stopped.

A small, dim place

where nothing burns

and nothing grows

and nothing changes.

This is not tragedy.

This is not pain.

This is erosion.

I leave no mark.

Even time has forgotten me.

Only the void remembers,

and it does not speak.