#ruins
Be tender, my love, as night unfolds,
While whispers of dreams grow faint and cold.
Your laughter once wove stars in my skies,
Now fades like the echo of soft goodbyes.
If you must leave, tread gentle and slow,
Like twilight that kisses the earth below.
But should you stay, be my constant flame,
A warmth without burn, a love without name.
Teach my heart patience in love’s endless fight,
As shadows embrace the lingering light.
For even in ruins, I'll softly aspire,
To love you through silence, through ash, through desire.
May 19
May 19, 2026 at 2:15 AM UTC
I didn’t come to admire the ruins.
They’re dramatic enough without my help.
Stones leaning like tired old men,
walls pretending they meant to fall that way.
I step over what used to matter –
carefully, out of habit,
though nothing here is fragile anymore.
There’s a kind of freedom in collapse.
No expectations.
No “should have been.”
Just the honest shape of what’s left.
I pick up a piece of something
that once held everything together.
It doesn’t look disappointed.
Neither am I.
I don’t read meaning into the rubble.
It’s just what remains
when something stops pretending.
Some days, I understand that.
Some days, I don’t.
What broke is behind me now.
I’m already building elsewhere,
quietly, without ceremony.
Mar 26
Mar 26, 2026 at 9:06 AM UTC
I stand at the border where the pavement blurs,
no longer searching for the girl who was a doorway.
I have walked the Hall of Parallax
and watched the monster dissolve into a shadow –
a trick of light, a keyhole view
mistaken for the whole horizon.
My suitcase is no longer packed with the wrong seasons.
I left it in the House of Unspoken Departures,
along with the metallic tang
of the truths I swallowed to keep the peace.
I am the one carrying the ticket now,
boarding a ship with a horizon
that finally feels like mine.
The city didn’t save me.
I protected myself.
I grew through the frost like a Winter Rose,
learning what I should have known all along:
I am perennial.
Behind me, the door clicks shut –
a clean punctuation mark.
Ahead, the Great Echo begins,
and for the first time in fifty‑four milestones,
the silence is spacious.
The radiance is mine.
Mar 1
Mar 1, 2026 at 5:29 AM UTC
The light dimmed. Mist curled around my ankles. The pavement blurred at the edges.
Silhouettes moved through the fog – not ghosts, but the spaces where connection failed to form.
The silence here was spacious, not heavy.
The Borderlands didn’t ask me to forget. It asked me to release.
I breathed in. The mist breathed with me.
When I turned back toward the city, I felt lighter, clearer, ready to go.
“The Transit Lounge” (poem 1.)
I arrive at the Transit Lounge
just as the morning crowd begins to gather,
travelers in bright, mismatched shirts
carrying the colors of places I’ve never been.
The air smells of coffee, citrus,
and the faint electricity of departure.
This is the city’s breathing space –
the practiced present,
where no one belongs for long
and no one is out of place.
I take a seat by the wide glass window.
Ship horns echo from the Industrial Fringe,
and somewhere behind me
cutlery clinks against plates
in the breakfast buffet of the newly unburdened.
Around me, people check maps,
repack bags,
tie their shoes with the quiet certainty
of those who know they’re going somewhere
even if they haven’t named it yet.
For a moment, I think of the Gallery of Echoes –
the lives I almost lived,
the selves that flickered and faded
as I walked past them.
But none of them followed me here.
They stay where they belong:
in the past, acknowledged,
but no longer steering the ship.
I look down at my own shirt –
stitched with the symbols
of the things I love,
the interests I’ve reclaimed,
the colors I once thought
were too bright for me.
I am not waiting for anyone now.
Not for a doorway I hoped someone else would open,
not for a life I didn’t know how to build alone.
I am the one boarding.
I am the one carrying the ticket.
A soft announcement hums overhead.
The room shifts –
not with fear,
but with readiness.
I stand,
feeling the steadiness of being among others
who are also in motion,
also between stories,
also learning that presence
is a kind of courage.
When I step toward the gate,
the city doesn’t hold me back.
It simply nods,
as if to say:
You’ve packed what you need.
The rest will meet you on the water.
And so I walk forward,
lighter than I arrived,
toward a ship whose destination
I haven’t mapped yet –
but whose horizon
finally feels like mine.
“The Marble Sepulcher” (poem 2.)
The Cathedral of Echoes rises
from the oldest quarter of the city,
its marble veined with silver,
its spires dissolving into a pale, drifting mist.
The air hums with a low, ancient resonance,
as if the building itself remembers
every voice that ever passed through it.
I cross the threshold,
and the temperature shifts –
cool at first, then warm,
like a hand closing gently around mine.
This is the Sepulcher:
not a tomb,
but a sanctuary for what endured.
Columns carved with faint constellations
line the nave,
each star a salvaged line
from my suffering youth –
words I wrote in haste,
truths whispered into the dark,
small sparks I thought had died
before they ever reached the page.
But here they gleam,
set into the marble
as if the city itself
refused to let them vanish.
My footsteps echo softly,
and the sound folds back on itself,
layer upon layer,
until I can no longer tell
which echoes are mine
and which belong to the poets
who walked here before me –
Keats murmuring from a distant alcove,
Emily’s quiet defiance drifting like incense,
Lawrence’s fire crackling in the rafters.
Somewhere among them,
my own voice rises –
steady now,
finally strong enough
to join the chorus.
At the ninth milestone,
the Veiled Archway waits,
draped in a living mist
that glows with a sovereign light.
A figure stands there,
holding a gown of transformation
woven from memory and breath.
I offer it one feeling
I carried too long –
the ache of being unseen –
and watch as it dissolves,
reforms,
and returns to me
as something gentler,
almost luminous.
Deeper still lies the Great Echo,
the heart of the Sepulcher.
The chamber opens like a vast,
hollowed bell,
its dome catching every sound
and turning it into music.
Here the past is not a burden
but a harmony –
a resonance of everything that endured,
everything that refused to die,
everything that made me.
I place my hand on the marble altar.
It is warm.
It is alive.
It is mine.
The Cathedral exhales,
and the echoes settle
into a single, radiant truth:
Nothing I created was wasted.
Nothing I survived was silent.
The beauty I thought had vanished
was only waiting
for me to return.
When I step back into the city,
the mist follows like a blessing.
The Transit Lounge glows ahead,
and beyond it,
the open horizon.
I leave the Sepulcher
lighter than I entered,
carrying not the ruins,
but the radiance
that rose from them.
Feb 28
Feb 28, 2026 at 1:58 PM UTC
Brightness rose from the ground like a sunrise. Buildings shimmered with heat‑etched patterns. The air felt like a forge.
Artists melted old molds into sparks. Dancers left trails of light. Painters worked with molten pigment.
This was ignition – the moment when transformation became inevitable.
I walked through fire and came out warm.
Feb 28
Feb 28, 2026 at 3:43 AM UTC
Warmth returned. Sidewalk cafés spilled into the streets. Porcelain cups repaired with gold seams clinked softly. People talked, laughed, lived. Not perfectly. Fully.
I sat at a small table and held a warm cup between my hands. This was practiced presence – healing in the company of others. I left steadier.
Feb 28
Feb 28, 2026 at 3:41 AM UTC
The air vibrated with motion. Shipyard cranes hummed like relics waking up. Rails curved toward new destinations.
Workers redirected the city’s old patterns, melting rigid molds in great braziers and reshaping them into something freer.
A half‑finished ship rested in a dry dock, patched with pieces of old seasons. It wasn’t a vessel for escape. It was a vessel for direction. I felt myself moving again.
Feb 28
Feb 28, 2026 at 3:40 AM UTC
Snow lay in patches across a cracked plaza, but roses grew through every seam – white, red, violet, their petals edged with ice. Beauty didn’t wait for permission here. It grew anyway. I touched a bloom. Warm beneath the frost. I understood: I didn’t need perfect conditions to grow.
I was perennial.
Feb 28
Feb 28, 2026 at 3:39 AM 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.
Feb 26
Feb 26, 2026 at 2:23 PM UTC
A long hall of pale stone. The walls looked bare until I walked deeper. Then the echoes appeared – silhouettes of the lives I almost lived.
Me in another city. Me boarding a train I never took. Me laughing with someone whose face I couldn’t quite see. Not regrets. Acknowledgments.
At the center, a glass sphere held the sum of my almosts. I touched it. It warmed. And the ache softened. I left lighter.
The Shifting City: “The Gallery of Echoes” (poem)
I walk into the hall of pale stone
and at first the walls look empty,
smooth as unbroken ice.
But then the air shifts,
and the room inhales,
and the outlines begin to rise.
Not portraits.
Not ghosts.
Just the faint blue silhouettes
of the lives I almost lived.
One flickers to my left –
a version of me boarding a train
I never took,
his coat catching the wind
of a city I never learned to pronounce.
He doesn’t look back.
Another stands at a window
in an apartment I nearly rented,
watering a plant I never owned,
humming a tune I never learned.
He seems content,
but he is not me.
A third sits at a café table
with someone whose face
is blurred by possibility.
Their laughter ripples
like a memory I can almost touch
but never quite claim.
I walk slowly,
and the echoes shift with me,
as if adjusting their distance
out of courtesy.
None of them accuse me.
None of them beckon.
They simply exist –
parallel lines
that never intersected
but still shaped the geometry
of my life.
At the center of the hall
a glass sphere waits,
its surface swirling
with faint colors
like breath on winter air.
I place my hand on it.
Warmth rises through my palm,
and for a moment
I feel every version of myself
that could have been –
not with longing,
not with grief,
but with a strange,
quiet recognition.
The sphere dims,
as if bowing,
and the echoes soften
into a gentle blue haze.
I exhale.
The hall exhales with me.
When I turn to leave,
the silhouettes remain behind –
not abandoned,
not dismissed,
but finally at rest.
I step back into the city
lighter than I entered,
carrying only the life
that is mine.
Feb 26
Feb 26, 2026 at 2:28 AM UTC
The air warmed. The scent of varnish and old paper filled the streets.
People here were salvagers – curators of the almost‑lost. A woman fitted mirror shards into a fountain so the water would reflect the sky again. A man mended a torn photograph with gold leaf. Children ran with pockets full of wonder.
Nothing here was new. Everything was renewed. I realized I was a salvager too.
The Shifting City: “The Second‑Hand District” (poem 1.)
In the Second‑Hand District,
the shop of unsaid things keeps odd hours.
Its windows are fogged with half‑formed sentences,
and the bell above the door rings
even when no one enters.
Inside, the shelves are crowded with almost‑words:
a folded apology still warm at the edges,
a thank‑you wrapped in brittle tissue,
a confession that trembles when I touch it,
remembering the mouth it never escaped.
The shopkeeper doesn’t speak.
He only watches what I reach for,
as though the unsaid has its own gravity,
pulling me toward the thing
I’m finally ready to claim.
I lift a small, unfinished sentence.
It pulses like a frightened animal in my palm.
I know it instantly –
the courage I almost had,
the truth I almost told,
the moment I almost stepped out of my own shadow.
I bring it to the counter.
The shopkeeper nods,
as if to say: It was always yours.
You just weren’t ready to hear it.
When I leave, the bell rings again.
This time, I know it’s for me.
The Shifting City: “The Hall of Parallax” (poem 2.)
In the Second‑Hand District,
there’s a building made of shifting lenses and mirrors.
Its walls tilt and breathe like something alive,
refracting every step I take
into versions of myself I almost recognize.
In our Reclamation, this is the Hall of Parallax—
the place where the Face of Truth is studied,
not as a single certainty,
but as two separated eyes
finally learning how to look together.
Here, my past self waits at a long table,
hands folded, patient,
still carrying the truths he swore were final:
You were defeated.
You were wasted.
You were the ruin, not the city.
I sit across from him.
The lenses shift.
The mirrors breathe.
And for the first time,
we see each other without flinching.
Friendly skepticism fills the room—
a gentleness that questions without wounding.
I turn his old truths in my hands
until they dissolve into what they always were:
partial views,
keyhole mountains,
shadows mistaken for monsters.
“I see why you believed this,” I tell him.
“And I see why I don’t anymore.”
The lenses align.
The two of us—broken and architect—
weld a single angle of vision,
melding agreement without erasing difference.
And in that moment,
the truth becomes clear:
I was never the monster.
I was only the shadow
learning where the light was coming from.
Feb 24
Feb 24, 2026 at 11:09 AM UTC
A cathedral lay in ruins, its stained‑glass windows shattered across the floor like fallen constellations.
Birds had gathered the shards and woven them into nests in the arches.
Sunlight refracted through them, casting shifting colors across my skin.
The city wasn’t trying to restore what was lost. It was transforming it.
I walked out shimmering.
Feb 24
Feb 24, 2026 at 6:38 AM UTC
From the cycle “Presence in the Ruins: The Shifting City”
The air cooled as I entered the ruined library. Books lay open on tables, their pages curled and unreadable, but every surface was covered in soft, glowing moss.
I touched a book. The moss yielded under my fingers, warm and alive. The words were gone, but the feeling remained.
This was where the past stopped insisting on precision and became something gentler.
I left with a strange sense of peace.
Feb 23
Feb 23, 2026 at 3:46 PM UTC
From the cycle “Presence in the Ruins: The Shifting City”
The first sign of life was sound – not music, but the rustling of leaves against old ivory. A grand piano sat in a roofless ballroom, its hollow filled with soil and rainwater. Ferns and lavender grew from its body, playing seasons instead of notes.
A breeze moved through the leaves, and for a moment, I heard the faint suggestion of a chord – not the past returning, but the future beginning.
Feb 23
Feb 23, 2026 at 3:44 PM UTC
Field Journal, Entry #804
I. Room One – The Almost‑Departure
The door doesn’t close behind me.
It hangs half‑latched,
as if waiting for a hand
that never quite committed to leaving.
The hallway smells like the moment
before a suitcase is zipped –
that faint, metallic scent
of a choice rehearsed
but never spoken aloud.
I step into the first room.
The air is still,
but not the peaceful kind of still –
the kind that holds its breath
because it remembers
I almost walked out once.
A suitcase sits open on the bed,
half‑packed with the wrong season’s clothes.
A sweater folded over the edge
like a question I never answered.
The clock on the wall
is stuck at the hour
I hesitated.
Not broken –
just unwilling to move forward
until I do.
I touch the handle of the suitcase
and the room exhales,
a soft release of dust
that rises like a confession.
This was the night
I told myself I’d leave
if she didn’t ask me to stay.
She didn’t.
And I didn’t.
The suitcase has been waiting ever since,
patient as regret,
for a version of me
who never arrived.
II. Room Two – The Departure I Swallowed
The second door opens
with the soft resistance
of a memory that never learned
how to speak for itself.
The room is dim,
lit only by the pale glow
of a window that refuses
to let the light fully in.
A table sits in the center,
set for two,
but only one chair
is pulled out.
The other remains tucked neatly in,
as if waiting for a guest
who never arrived
because I never asked her to.
On the table lies a single plate,
its surface dusted
with the fine powder
of unsaid sentences.
I brush my fingers across it
and the dust gathers into shapes –
half‑formed words,
the beginnings of truths
I never managed to finish.
This is the room
where I rehearsed my leaving
in silence.
Where I told myself
I’d speak up
if she looked at me
with anything resembling care.
She didn’t.
And I didn’t.
The air tastes faintly
of withheld honesty –
that metallic tang
of a truth kept too long
behind the teeth.
In the corner,
a glass of water sits untouched,
its surface perfectly still,
reflecting a version of me
who almost said
what needed saying.
I lean closer
and the reflection trembles,
as if even now
the words are trying
to rise.
But they don’t.
They never did.
I leave the room quietly,
closing the door
on the conversation
I never had.
III. Room Three – The Departure She Made Before I Noticed
The third door opens
without a sound.
Not a creak,
not a sigh,
not even the soft complaint
of old hinges.
It opens the way she left –
quietly,
without ceremony,
without the courtesy
of a final echo.
The room is perfectly arranged.
Nothing out of place.
Nothing disturbed.
Nothing alive.
A coat hangs on the hook by the door,
its fabric still shaped
to the memory of her shoulders,
but when I touch it
the cloth is cold,
as if it has forgotten
the warmth it once held.
The bed is made.
The books are stacked.
The lamp is turned off
but still angled toward the chair
where she used to sit
when she pretended to listen.
Everything is here.
And she is nowhere.
This is the room
where I realized too late
that absence can arrive
long before departure.
A teacup sits on the windowsill,
half‑full,
the surface filmed over
with a thin skin of time.
She must have set it down
in the middle of a thought
and never returned to finish it.
I stand in the doorway
and the room does not greet me.
It does not remember me.
It does not even resent me.
It simply exists
in the shape of a life
that had already moved on.
I look at the coat again –
the one she left behind
as if she might come back for it.
But she didn’t.
And I didn’t notice
when she stopped meaning to.
The room feels like a photograph
taken a moment after
someone stepped out of frame.
I close the door gently,
as if not to disturb
the ghost of a departure
that happened
long before I understood
I’d been left.
IV. The Stairwell – The Echo of Footsteps That Never Happened
The stairwell waits for me
like a held breath.
It rises in a slow, deliberate curve,
each step worn smooth
by the weight of choices
I never made.
As I place my foot on the first step,
the wood gives a soft groan –
not from age,
but from recognition.
Halfway up,
I hear footsteps above me.
Not loud.
Not hurried.
Just steady, measured steps
ascending at a pace
I never found the courage to match.
I freeze.
The footsteps continue,
but they are not hers.
They are mine –
from a life where I actually left.
A shadow moves along the wall,
slender and certain,
a silhouette of the man
I might have become
if I’d walked out
when the truth first asked me to.
He doesn’t look back.
He doesn’t hesitate.
He climbs with the quiet confidence
of someone who knows
that leaving is not betrayal
when staying is self‑erasure.
I follow him,
but the distance between us
never closes.
He is always one step ahead,
always just out of reach,
always ascending toward a future
I never claimed.
The stairwell hums with the echo
of footsteps that never happened –
a soft percussion
of unrealized departures.
By the time I reach the landing,
the shadow has vanished,
leaving only the faint warmth
of a life unlived
lingering on the banister.
I rest my hand there,
feeling the ghost of a choice
I almost made.
V. The Final Room – The Departure You Finally Understand
The last door is different.
It isn’t closed.
It isn’t open.
It stands ajar,
as if the room behind it
has been expecting me
but refuses to greet me first.
I push it gently.
The hinges don’t protest.
They simply yield,
like someone stepping aside
to let me pass.
The room is empty.
No furniture.
No dust.
No forgotten objects
waiting to be interpreted.
Just a bare floor
and four walls
that feel too honest
to hide anything.
For a moment,
I think I’ve come to the wrong place –
that this room has nothing to show me.
But then I notice the window.
It’s open.
Not wide,
just enough
for a breeze to slip through
and stir the air
with the faint scent
of a street I’ve never walked down.
I step closer.
The floorboards warm beneath my feet,
as if someone stood here recently,
thinking the same thought
I’m thinking now.
This is the room
where the truth lives.
Not the truth about her.
Not the truth about the leaving.
The truth about me.
I stayed
because I was waiting
for the version of her
I met at the beginning –
the bright, impossible girl
who felt like a doorway
to a life I didn’t know how to build alone.
But she was already gone
long before I realized
I was loving a memory
instead of a person.
And I was too afraid
to admit it.
The room doesn’t accuse me.
It doesn’t comfort me.
It simply holds the truth
the way an open hand
holds a fragile thing
without closing around it.
I look out the window.
The street below
is unfamiliar,
quiet,
lit by a soft, forgiving dusk.
A path I never took.
A life I never lived.
A departure I finally understand.
Behind me,
the door begins to close
on its own.
Not as punishment.
Not as rejection.
As release.
I step through the window’s light
and let the room
seal itself
behind me.
The Exit – The Door That Closes Itself
I stepped outside.
The air was cooler, cleaner.
Behind me, the door clicked shut –
a punctuation mark.
I didn’t turn back.
There was nothing left in that house I needed to carry.
Ahead, the street bent toward the Shifting City.
I walked...
Feb 22
Feb 22, 2026 at 9:10 AM UTC
Field Journal, Entry #711
The map refuses to hold still.
Every time I unfold it, the streets rearrange themselves,
as if the city is correcting my memory
rather than the other way around.
The compass spins when I think of her.
It settles only when I let the thought pass
like weather moving across a distant ridge.
I walk the avenues that weren’t here yesterday,
their stones warm with the after‑image
of a presence that no longer walks them,
yet still alters the light.
The map trembles in my hands
as if it resents being unfolded.
Lines that should be fixed
shiver like reeds in shallow water,
and the districts I thought I knew
slide a few centimeters to the left
as though embarrassed
to be remembered too clearly.
I try to anchor the page with my thumb,
but the ink recoils from certainty.
It beads, gathers,
then rearranges itself into a shape
I almost recognize
before dissolving again
into a topography of hesitation.
I walk anyway.
The stones beneath my feet
shift temperature with each step,
warm where I once stood with her,
cold where I stood alone,
and somewhere in between
a faint, trembling heat
that feels like the memory of wanting
without the memory of why.
The compass is no help.
It spins whenever I try to name a direction,
but steadies the moment
I let the thought pass unclaimed.
It seems the city prefers
that I move without intention,
as if purpose itself
distorts the terrain.
At the corner of a street
that wasn’t here yesterday,
I find a lamppost leaning slightly inward,
its shadow curving
in the exact shape of her posture
the last time she turned away.
Not a haunting,
just a place where the light
still remembers her.
I sketch it quickly,
but the moment my pencil touches the page,
the lamppost straightens,
the shadow flattens,
and the street behind me
rearranges itself
into a version of the past
I don’t recall choosing.
The paradox is clear now:
I am not mapping the ruins.
The ruins are mapping me.
Every turn I take
redraws the city behind me,
as if the past refuses
to be pinned to a single narrative.
As if memory, like weather,
is only honest
when left unmeasured.
I fold the map carefully,
not to preserve it,
but to acknowledge
that it will not be the same
when I open it again.
At last I reach a plaza
that refuses to shift.
The stones here hold their shape
with a quiet, stubborn gravity,
as if this is the one place in the city
that remembers itself
without my help.
The map in my hand goes still.
No trembling, no rearranging,
just a soft, exhausted settling
like a creature that has finally
stopped resisting its own weight.
In the center of the plaza
stands a single marker:
a small, unremarkable pillar of stone
worn smooth by weather
I can’t recall surviving.
There is no inscription.
No date.
No name.
Only a faint warmth
where a hand once rested,
hers, mine, I can’t be sure,
but the distinction feels irrelevant.
For the first time,
I understand the paradox:
The city shifts
because I kept trying to fix it.
This place stays still
because I finally stopped.
I close the map.
Not to end the journey,
but to let the ruins breathe
without the pressure
of being understood.
When I look up,
the streets around me
are no longer rearranging themselves.
They simply wait,
patient as stone,
for the next step I choose to take.
And for the first time
since entering this city,
I walk without needing
to know where I am.
Feb 18
Feb 18, 2026 at 12:23 PM UTC
(Field Journal: "Presence in the Ruins" – Site 2)
Entry #402: I have reached the inner sanctum of the things we didn’t say.
I stepped over the threshold and found the air tasting of iron and old rain,
a gallery of things that lost their voices
before they could lose their breath.
I. The Heavy Letters
The first chamber holds the messages that were too weighted to release.
They lie in shallow depressions in the stone floor,
each one shaped like a folded sheet of lead.
Some have sunk so deeply
that only their corners remain visible,
glinting like dull teeth.
I try to lift one –
it does not move.
It remembers its burden too well.
II. The Wildlife of the Unspoken
Further in, the air stirs.
Small, eyeless birds circle the ceiling,
their wings made of brittle parchment.
They emit no sound,
only the faint rustle of words that never found a destination.
Confessions, mostly.
A few accusations.
One or two fragile hopes.
They fly in loops,
forever returning to the point where they began.
III. The Atmosphere
The deeper I go,
the thicker the air becomes –
salt, dust, and the metallic tang
of a storm that gathered once
but never broke.
Breathing here feels like inhaling
the pressure of all the moments
we almost spoke.
IV. The Artifact
At the far end of the vault,
beneath a veil of undisturbed dust,
I find it —
the one message that belonged to the mythic version of her.
It is not a letter.
It is a small, translucent shard,
clear as river glass
and warm to the touch.
When I hold it up to the dim light,
I see a single phrase suspended inside,
perfectly preserved,
as if spoken in a world
where it might have mattered.
I do not break it open.
Some artifacts are meant to be held,
not deciphered.
V. Closing Notes
I seal the vault behind me.
The birds settle.
The leaden letters rest.
The storm in the air waits for no one.
I leave with only the shard,
light enough to carry,
clear enough to keep,
and silent enough
to belong in this new map
I am learning to draw.
Feb 15
Feb 15, 2026 at 2:28 PM UTC
I came back to the place
where the echoes stopped breathing,
to the city our voices once built
stone by stone,
argument by argument,
touch by hesitant touch.
Now the silence lies over everything,
not emptiness,
but a substance with weight,
a pale drift of ash settling on my shoulders
like a language I no longer speak.
I walk through collapsed doorways
where our laughter once lived,
my footsteps sinking into the hush
as if the ground remembers
how heavy we were with wanting.
The air tastes of cold iron,
like the hinge of an ancient gate
that hasn’t opened in years
but still remembers the shape of movement.
I sift through the ruins
not for closure,
but for the one artifact
I know must have survived.
And there it is,
half‑buried,
untouched by time or tide:
the word you once gave me
without hesitation.
A promise so small
it could fit in the palm of my hand,
yet so clear
it refuses to erode.
I lift it gently,
brush the silence from its edges,
and for a moment
the city stirs —
arches straighten,
windows inhale,
the old streets remember their names.
But only for a moment.
The silence settles again,
patient as dust,
claiming what it always meant to claim.
And I understand, finally,
that some ruins are not meant to be rebuilt.
Only visited.
Only witnessed.
Only left with the artifact
that stayed true
when everything else
slipped from present to gone.
Feb 14
Feb 14, 2026 at 12:32 PM UTC
the garden of harvest
in the remains
of what could’ve been.
skeleton trees,
eyes in roots,
screeches
from above
silenced,
straying dust
without motion.
flatlands reaching
for a horizon,
trapped between
the earth and
a black sky,
the moon and the sun
no longer there.
a lone river runs dry,
the bridges burnt,
there’s no one left,
not even worms
writhing in the soil,
thickened oil
oozing the grounds
left behind
nothing but one last mirror,
shattered
in pieces,
caught reflecting
the ruins
of forgotten memories.
watching it last
while chains
from under
holding me down
in the chambers
made
out of time.
voices of despair,
crying
no more,
last remnants
of hope
for a door that opens
dies
as a wind passes by
and time
stops.
Jan 23
Jan 23, 2026 at 8:31 AM UTC
When the storm finally spent itself,
I found no revelation –
only a steadier breath,
a room returned to its own silence,
and the knowledge that I had not broken.
Survival is not a victory march.
It is the slow reclaiming of ordinary days,
the quiet refusal to be defined
by someone else’s disappearance,
by the echo they leave behind.
No epiphany waits in the wreckage,
no sudden light to bless the aftermath.
But there is a truth that arrives
only when the noise is gone:
the truth of still being here.
I do not rise from the ruins transformed.
I rise because I can,
because the ground beneath me is mine again,
because the storm took what it could,
and left me standing still.
This is the self that remains:
not triumphant,
not remade,
but intact—
and that is enough.
Jan 11
Jan 11, 2026 at 11:54 AM UTC
A smile arises from the irony:
The heart misses you,
The brain is scared,
And in a vain attempt,
To save the broken pieces,
Sculpts your precious ojitos,
Accross my ruined realm.
How funny is the thought...
Jan 10
Jan 10, 2026 at 7:47 AM UTC
i’m still mourning
the blueprint of the future
i was told i’d have.
the wonder child,
fluent
in multiple languages,
who filled the shelves
with certificates
and trophies,
set to touch the clouds.
everyone told me
what to achieve
but no one taught me
how to rebuild
from the rubble
of all my small
catastrophes
and i’m still sifting
through the dust.
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025 at 8:39 AM UTC
~I~
I stumbled upon it—
this ruin, veiled in ivy,
its ribs of stone strangled
by nature’s lace.
A withered door hangs
on one iron thread-
the last breath of smiths
Dressed in oxide
Fractured silence beckons
Childish will to explore
Danger wrapped in lycen
Blight decays the frame
Dense fog dulls the raven
Black wings set the tone
Moss laden windows
Sinew stripped from bone
~II~
The unforgiving soul
Shallow she remains
Where death Lays
Her winter blanket
Fed with the tears
Of a mournful mother
Her ripples stretch
To his lifeless hand
Consumed by darkness
The repugnant stench
Weeps into a crevice
From her lustful killer
Discarded shells
Linger with the last
Gasps of trauma,
Distress and pain
Light chastens through
The absent gable
Warming the spores
Of tortured innocence
Lifting the pure from
From the grasp
Of Mephistopheles
And eternal purgatory
By Darren Wall
Nov 10, 2025
Nov 10, 2025 at 5:00 PM UTC
Ruins where once were
houses and streets, where once was --
undeveloped land.
Oct 1, 2025
Oct 1, 2025 at 3:41 AM UTC