Beneath the Gallery, the air still crackles.
Here, the hurt doesn’t sleep – it loops.
Every echo is unfinished, every shadow mid‑sentence,
and the walls hum with things no one survived enough to name.
I descend anyway, carrying a light I didn’t have last year.
The steps feel older than the city,
carved by versions of me
that once mistook pain for permanence.
Down here, the echoes don’t rest.
They gnaw.
They repeat.
They cling like static to the bones of the room,
insisting the wound is the world
and nothing ever changes.
But I stand in the center of the noise
and feel the shift –
not in the echoes, not in the walls,
but in the gravity of my listening.
The hurt is eternal only to itself.
It loops because it has no witness.
It devours because it has never been named.
So I speak, not to silence it,
but to mark the boundary between us:
You are what happened.
I am what remains.
The static flickers.
The room exhales.
And for the first time,
the Oubliette feels less like a prison
and more like a chamber I can leave
without losing any part of myself.
Feb 26
Feb 26, 2026 at 2:23 PM UTC
Beneath the Gallery, the air still crackles.
Here, the hurt doesn’t sleep – it loops.
Every echo is unfinished, every shadow mid‑sentence,
and the walls hum with things no one survived enough to name.
I descend anyway, carrying a light I didn’t have last year.
The steps feel older than the city,
carved by versions of me
that once mistook pain for permanence.
Down here, the echoes don’t rest.
They gnaw.
They repeat.
They cling like static to the bones of the room,
insisting the wound is the world
and nothing ever changes.
But I stand in the center of the noise
and feel the shift –
not in the echoes, not in the walls,
but in the gravity of my listening.
The hurt is eternal only to itself.
It loops because it has no witness.
It devours because it has never been named.
So I speak, not to silence it,
but to mark the boundary between us:
You are what happened.
I am what remains.
The static flickers.
The room exhales.
And for the first time,
the Oubliette feels less like a prison
and more like a chamber I can leave
without losing any part of myself.
From the cycle “Presence in the Ruins: The Shifting City.”
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