I have a room inside me that never learns to stay lit –
the bulbs hum like old refrigerators, tired and polite.
It is not only sadness; it is the slow settling of stone,
the placing of a palm on a wound I cannot name.
My smile is a borrowed coin pressed into the mouth of a beggar,
metal cool and unfamiliar. I practice saying fine –
the syllables are tidy, a drawer snapped shut against the dark.
Talking feels like choosing which limb to cut off first.
Mornings arrive like tax bills: inevitable and cruel.
I open my eyes and the world is a ledger of small violences –
the sun a pale creditor, the coffee bitter and obedient.
Breathing is a job I clock in for and instantly forget why.
There is a weight that knows the map of my bones better than I do,
it presses where directions used to be, flattens neighborhoods of hope.
Pain has become a general ledger: no line item, only balance
always a number red and endless, always due.
Sometimes I imagine carving a window into that room –
letting a sliver of weather in to see if weather remembers me.
But the shutters are welded with sentences I did not finish,
and the key is small and lost in the pocket of some other life.
The worst is the geography of it: no sharp edge to point at,
no bruise with a date, no neat explanation for why the rain keeps staying.
Only the knowing that whatever I touch comes away colder,
and I learn, slowly, how to fold myself into an acceptable silence.
If I could name the hurt, I’d dress it in words and parade it out –
but language is thin clothing for a storm this old.
So I wrap myself in softer lies and hand them to strangers,
say I'm fine and watch them believe me because they want to.
Tonight, I will tread the house of my own chest and count the rooms
the kitchen where hunger goes to sleep, the attic of all the almosts,
the cellar where my laughter ferments into objects I no longer own.
I will not find an answer. I will find the weight again, patient and exact.
Existing has become empty, a hollow rhythm,
a clock with no hands.
The worst is not knowing where the wound begins,
only that it’s everywhere –
a bruise spread across my soul, aching without edges,
bleeding without proof.
It hurts,
always hurts,
and I cannot name it.
I only know
it never leaves.
©️ Dark Water Diaries