How does it feel when all your dreams are crumbling before you? I breathe ashes and dust; my lungs are clear.
My heart – my traitorous heart – beats a steady rhythm.
How can I feel? These words aren’t enough. Looking out of these eyes, writing with these fingers, breathing with these lungs.
Lay your heart bare on the table, and bleed.
And after, with my inky life-blood leaking onto the table, it’s not enough. I slice my soul apart, and it is never enough. How can any sequence of words be more genuine, more real, more vulnerable?
We are replications; forged in deceivers’ minds, we remake ourselves.
To stamp on my pride, my honour, my soul again. To deem myself a number, lesser than.
I’m so tired.
I’m silent, wordless, floating – no, drifting – in this oblivion, this space between worlds. The wooden floor is steady beneath my feet, the ceiling light bright and cold. What else can I do but describe? Words are so meaningless.
A construction, a reconstruction. Memories like smoke, flimsy like those summer days I have imagined and reimagined a thousand times. A summer flock clinging to wet skin, the scent of grass, the sun. Which one of these is real?
Fragmentation does not make for a good story. Sequences and plot and purpose. What senseless wandering is this?
Insubstantial. Inconsequential.
These empty eyes like fish peer unblinkingly at the ceiling.
The stench of death follows you. And what do you know of death?
I can build a thousand broken images. Incomplete and insubstantial, they float away.
Every sketch, every iteration. All false, all true.
All not good enough.

I can’t speak. I am mute. The words, half-formed, stop between my heart and my lips. What was I going to say?
Mundanities. Sit and listen. Shut up. I’m listening.
What did you say?
It’s grey, but I can see in colours, so many colours. My heart beats, the warmth of my hands, my steady breaths. I am.
I’m lost in this pinwheel, this spinning circle, the inevitabilities. Round and round we go. I exist in moments. Each second the hands pass. I am silenced. I have nothing to say. Onwards we continue. March onwards. Brave soldiers, courageous warriors, forward I tell you, forward!
I’m so dizzy. Oh please, can we rest for a while.
Now I don’t know. I know nothing. I am nothing.
Falling like raindrops, broken dolls you lie on the floor. Still, your unmoving eyes remain, reflecting hollowed moons.
Watch me. Watch, watch closely.
I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say. No matter. There’s always tomorrow.
Empty as always. Take out my soul, scrape me raw. I am a husk. Crumbling, but untouched perfection. Automaton, I feel nothing.
Oh, invisible man, where are you?
We walk in circles. Monday, Monday and a thousand Mondays again.
Below lies the fiery depths of hell. Above, the unforgiving brilliance of heaven. And in between, an endless purgatory.
We are hamsters on a wheel. Waiting.
Are you listening, or not?

muted greys and dull blues
darkening skies like smudged smoke and pen ink
bruises beneath your eyes

spilt coffee and hasty scrawls
in the margins of the black leather bound journal
you carry
the hum of a thousand conversations blurring together
in the silence of your mind
(i can never escape the ecstasy of your soul)

i exist within a vacuum
dust particles drift by
as if behind
glass

Now she sits on the beach, clothes still damp and encrusted with sand; night has fallen. Twilight creeps clandestine, enveloping the sky in a motley patchwork of blues and purples, and pinpricks of stars begin to emerge. Before her, the city sprawls, a Leviathan metropolis of metal and steel; though it is still silent, lights begin to illuminate the skyline.
How do the city lights shine, even as the people are still? She wonders. How much of the world will continue without them?
The cityscape reflects on the water and the scintillating glow of yellow and white blur together before her eyes. Beneath the myriad of stars and the vast expanse of darkened sky, rolling waves wash upon the sand like an undulating pendulum; the steady, unfettered oscillation of the ocean.
It is as if she is the last person on Earth.
There are no people here, not in this floating island of hopes and dreams, this junkyard of precious things, this lonely planet of lost tomorrows. She is Adam, first of her kind, alone in Eden; the Rainbow Snake etching mountains across Country; Erebus first emerged from Chaos.
She could be anywhere doing anything, yet here she is, seated before a throne of stars, watching the ocean – it seems the universe has converged into this single moment.
The gentle ebb and flow of the waves, the wax and wane of an inconstant moon, the changing of the seasons; these all mark the passing of time of a world constantly in movement. The numerous incandescent constellations are but a pale mimicry of the blinking city lights reflected on the water, shining beacons of human progression. However, there is a comfort in their evanescence, the fleeting brilliance of the metropolis, yet faint perpetuity of the stars; she is immortalised in them, written into the very fabric of the cosmos.
I am the universe, she thinks.
She is the child, filled with wonder; the mother, reaching for her babe; the slow lonely degradation of the invisible elderly. She is Genesis and Revelations, Alpha and Omega, where the beginning and ending coalesce into a singularity. She is the culmination of countless, immeasurable contradictions and paradoxes that make up her, and her life, and humanity, and the world, and billions of innumerable things, that in the end bear little significance beneath the majesty of the stars.
It is still, save for the gentle ripples of light refracting on the water and the steady rise of her chest.
Does she dare to disturb the universe?