I walk, but I do not move.
The floor is solid, unyielding,
cold concrete pressing against my bare soles.
I do not remember when I began,
only that I cannot stop.
Above, a ceiling I have never seen
hanging like a sky too weary to hold itself up.
A sky of heaving darkness. Thick as tar.
Clouds so thick they devour the light,
so heavy they press against my thoughts,
shaping them into something I cannot hold.
The silence here is a living thing.
It slithers through the cracks of my mind,
settling into the spaces where hope once bloomed.
No whispers, no voices—
only the sound of my own footsteps,
dull, lifeless,
never echoing, never answering.
Pillars rise from the concrete.
Monolithic, ancient,
marble treaked with veins of shadow.
They stand like forgotten gods,
spaced far apart,
too vast to be real,
too distant to be touched.
And yet, they are nothing here.
Swallowed whole by the endless height,
dwarfed by the great and hungry dark.
They reach upward,
but they will never find the top,
just as I may never find a way out.
I call out, but the walls refuse to answer.
Are there walls?
Or is this an endless void,
a cage without edges,
a prison without a door?
I keep walking,
circling the same unseen pain,
dragging my thoughts like chains
across a floor that does not care.
And somewhere, in the thick of the silence,
something watches—
or maybe, nothing does.
And maybe that is worse.