I stood in the hallway,
the familiar scent of jasmine hanging heavy—
my mother’s perfume.

I called her name,
but it wasn’t the voice of my mother
that answered.

It was mine—
but younger.

I turned the corner,
and there she was—
sitting at the kitchen table,
but her eyes…
they weren’t hers anymore.

"I’ve waited for you,"
she whispered,
and the room went cold.

I reached for her,
but my fingers sank into her skin—
soft, pliable,
like wax—
too easy.

And I realized too late—
she wasn’t waiting for me.
She was pulling me in.

Then I felt it—
a slow, unbearable pressure in my chest.
I couldn’t breathe.

"You’ll never leave me again."

Gold seeps like marrow,
stars bruise against the void.
"Light is starving," he mutters,
"even the sun feasts on its own fire."

Frost exhales—
a slow, deliberate frostbite.
"Light is a path,"he murmurs,
"but men mistake fire for direction—"
"they burn chasing it."

Emily lingers, a moth in lace,
wings dusted in ruin.
"And yet, all paths end the same—"
"a mouthful of quiet, a bed of hush."

Vincent laughs—ochre-stained teeth,
lips split with fevered art.
"Silence is blue," he whispers,
"a drowning, gasping blue—"
"the color of voices suffocated in paint."

Ruskin presses a palm to the glass,
watching years soften like ink in water.
"No, silence is the color of old hills—"
"of books breathing dust in rooms left untouched."

Emily smirks.
"Ah, but death is an artist too—"
"it sketches men into whispers, steals them like dust in light."

Vincent exhales, trembling.
"Then let it take me in color."
"Let me vanish in thick strokes—"
"golden, breathless, eternal."

Frost watches shadows stretch long.
"Some men vanish in quieter ways—"
"no fire, no frenzy—just the hush of winter."

Ruskin traces ivy creeping over forgotten doors.
"Some men vanish like abandoned houses—"
"sinking soft into time’s arms."

Emily tilts her head, voice a half-buried secret.
"Perhaps eternity is not silence—"
"but the echo of a name no one dares to speak."

Veiled in nocturnal opulence, she sways—
a specter of dusk wreathed in abyssal silk,
her beauty a chiaroscuro of ruin and divinity,
where the fabric of night quivers against her skin,
a tremor between creation and collapse.

Her lips, smeared with the ink of oblivion,
part like a fault line spilling whispers of dissolution,
drinking the hush of a waning moon,
where silver tongues unravel dirges in the wind.
Her gaze—twin cataclysms of obsidian and opal—
devours the marrow of time,
hollowing the cosmos with the weight of her quiet ruin.

She unfurls like velvet hemorrhaging silence,
the air trembling with the ghosts of forgotten incantations,
stitched into the sinew of midnight’s elegy,
where time convulses, folding into the iridescent wreckage
of her shadow-drenched grace.

The air cleaves, static-thick—
a fuselage of sound lacerates the hush,
metal entrails rupturing sky,
the aftershock draping itself
over a man who once outran
a city’s collapse.

His ribs still bear the weight
of the bomb that did not **** him.
His breath—
a fissure splintering
through the wet hush of memory.
The war remembers him
before he remembers the war.

Elsewhere, a child flinches
at the snarl of firecrackers,
cinders curling their tongues through the air.
The smell of burning skin never quite leaves—
it lingers in the architecture of memory,
in the way hands recoil from heat
long after scars have paled.

And then, there is me—

Not sirens.
Not gunfire.
Not calamity’s echo.

A clock does not tick.
It gnaws—
a scalpel carving time into my marrow,
chewing at the walls of existence.
Its rhythm—
an elegy for the unstirred,
a pulse of urgency
lodged between my teeth.

The city writhes in metallic discord—
horns braying like gutted creatures,
steel nerves shrieking beneath
the weight of their own impatience.
Traffic thickens into a thrumming fever,
pressing against the skull,
a needling static unraveling thought.

Crowds surge, faceless, voiceless—
speech dissolving into the blur of motion,
gestures hollowing into gestures,
the world slipping into a reel
that plays too fast,
then too slow,
then too fast again.

But the loudest sound,
the one that cleaves me in half,
is the one that does not exist—

Silence.

Where thought unspools unchecked,
where absence carries its own gravity.
A hush so vast
it stretches skin thin over bone,
so boundless
it becomes deafening.

Time falters—
splintered light pressed through rusted blinds—
a room forgetting itself.

His hands—
once steady
now vessels for something hollow,
something slipping through.

"I found a sad little fairy
Beneath the shade of a paper tree.
I know a sad little fairy
Who was blown away by the wind one night."

Her name
a bird trapped in his throat
fluttering against the ribs
half-formed—
half-vanished—

How cruel—
to carry the ache
and not the shadow
that cast it.

Somewhere—
the past is still happening
small hands folding into larger ones,
the hush of stories whispered into the hollow of sleep—
a red kite tangled in the branches—
the scent of almonds and grass.

But memory is a delicate violence
it gives and it takes
it leaves only what can be carried
yellow feathers,
paper trees,
the ghost of a name
pressed into the soft cage of breath.

He smiles—
without knowing why,
without knowing who

the echo—
soft as breath against glass,
fading before it touches

And somewhere—
she is still holding his hand,
leading him home

a yellow feather
caught in the hush of his breath—
weightless—
circling—
never falling.

Summer belonged to the mangoes first—
golden, sun-fat, splitting at the seams,
dripping down wrists, pooling in the hollows
of our hands— a crime scene of sweetness.

We ate without caution,
let the sugar gloss our lips,
let the gold run—drip, smear,
something like hunger, something like greed.

Your mother hated the mess.
Scrubbed your fingers raw,
tut-tutted about sticky floors,
the bad habits ripening in you.

But mine—mine only laughed,
pressed my palms between hers,
kissed the sugared wounds like an oath,
said, let some things be wild, love.

That summer, we outran the heat,
split the dusk with our honey-lunged laughter,
left fingerprints gilded in the sun.

And when I told my grandfather I liked mangoes,
he arrived the next morning with a whole harvest,
grinning like he had outwitted the season itself.

My mother still laughs,
but I scrub my hands clean now.

Some things stain.
Some things don’t.

He arrived ,
fire-tongued
wings lacquered in sunlight,
like a breath the garden forgot to exhale
green burning against green.

I was a child
with small hands that believed
giving was enough
to make something stay.

I fed him,
chilies plucked from the crooked vines
my father planted
bright little tongues,
burning red,
barely ripened,
all I had.

He bit me,
a clean puncture,
as if to say:

Love is no debt I owe you.

Blood welled up,
startling, hot,
the first truth nature ever gave me.

I stood there crying
while he finished the offering,
then flew away,
lighter.

What child understands hunger
until it pierces skin?

The next day,
I was waiting,
small hands trembling again,
opening as if the bite
had never happened.

I have taken the flowers.
Ripped them from the light,
peeled their bright faces back
like something skinned alive.

They did not scream.
They only folded—
like lungs emptied of air,
like mouths pried open
with nothing left to say.

O, love is a quiet violence.
A hand that plucks.
A hand that presses.
A weight that does not crush—
only keeps.

Here, a lilac curls,
like a severed breath.
Here, a daisy chokes on dust.
Here, a rose—veins milk-white,
mouth frozen in a paper-thin hush—
a relic of something that once burned.

And tell me, do they still remember?
The wind that kissed them last,
the trembling hands that held too tight,
or only the silence left behind?

I listen—
ear to time’s brittle ribs,
to the breath of pressed petals,
to the ruin love leaves in its wake.

And somewhere,
in the marrow of silence,
I swear I hear them—

whisper back.