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#shadowofsself
I am building houses in reverse— dismantling the nursery before the child, unhinging doors that were never installed, pulling nails from phantom walls. Each blueprint turns to smoke in my hands. I measure twice, cut nothing, stand in empty lots where foundations were poured in a dream I can't stop having. The neighbors walk their dogs past my vacant plot. They see flat earth. I see ruins. There is a museum in my chest where I curate exhibits no one visits. Behind glass: the battle scars, each one labeled in a language I haven't taught anyone to read. Some wounds are fossils now— ancient, compressed into stone, but still somehow aching when the weather turns. I lead tours through empty galleries, explaining significance to no one, my voice echoing off sterile walls. The plaques all say: Circa Unknown. Artist: Anonymous. Medium: Survival. On loan from a private collection. I am homesick for a place that exists only on maps I've burned. The coordinates lead to water now, and I am so tired of swimming toward horizons that keep unpainting themselves. I doggy-paddle through futures that evaporate, treading water in the conditional tense— would have, could have, might have been. Sometimes I float on my back and mistake the sky for solid ground. There are wars being waged in my bone marrow. Battles in my bloodstream no satellite can see. I am both the front lines and the disputed territory, the siege and the city under siege. I plant white flags in my organs but the fighting never stops— just moves to a different theater, a different season, a different unnamed country inside me. The news never covers these conflicts. There are no reporters embedded in my ribcage. I'm fine, I tell the concerned faces, and I am—the way a house is fine when everyone's moved out, when the lights work but no one remembers to turn them on. The furniture is still arranged. The clocks still tick. But the air tastes like afterwards, like the pause between séances, like a sentence no one finished. I am present in my absence. I am the dream of waking up. I am checked out like a library book no one's coming back for, accumulating late fees in a language I'm too tired to calculate. The pages of me are dog-eared, the spine cracked from being opened to the same chapter over and over: the one where I almost believed it. At night, I visit the houses I never built, walk through rooms that don't exist, touch walls made of wishes, and grieve like a ghost haunting its own absence— not the person I was, but the person I was supposed to become, the one who lived in the future I don't believe in, the one who knew how to be fine without the quotation marks around it.
0
Nov 8, 2025
Nov 8, 2025 at 4:22 PM UTC
Nodrog
Blueprint of a Ghost
I am building houses in reverse— dismantling the nursery before the child, unhinging doors that were never installed, pulling nails from phantom walls. Each blueprint turns to smoke in my hands. I measure twice, cut nothing, stand in empty lots where foundations were poured in a dream I can't stop having. The neighbors walk their dogs past my vacant plot. They see flat earth. I see ruins. There is a museum in my chest where I curate exhibits no one visits. Behind glass: the battle scars, each one labeled in a language I haven't taught anyone to read. Some wounds are fossils now— ancient, compressed into stone, but still somehow aching when the weather turns. I lead tours through empty galleries, explaining significance to no one, my voice echoing off sterile walls. The plaques all say: Circa Unknown. Artist: Anonymous. Medium: Survival. On loan from a private collection. I am homesick for a place that exists only on maps I've burned. The coordinates lead to water now, and I am so tired of swimming toward horizons that keep unpainting themselves. I doggy-paddle through futures that evaporate, treading water in the conditional tense— would have, could have, might have been. Sometimes I float on my back and mistake the sky for solid ground. There are wars being waged in my bone marrow. Battles in my bloodstream no satellite can see. I am both the front lines and the disputed territory, the siege and the city under siege. I plant white flags in my organs but the fighting never stops— just moves to a different theater, a different season, a different unnamed country inside me. The news never covers these conflicts. There are no reporters embedded in my ribcage. I'm fine, I tell the concerned faces, and I am—the way a house is fine when everyone's moved out, when the lights work but no one remembers to turn them on. The furniture is still arranged. The clocks still tick. But the air tastes like afterwards, like the pause between séances, like a sentence no one finished. I am present in my absence. I am the dream of waking up. I am checked out like a library book no one's coming back for, accumulating late fees in a language I'm too tired to calculate. The pages of me are dog-eared, the spine cracked from being opened to the same chapter over and over: the one where I almost believed it. At night, I visit the houses I never built, walk through rooms that don't exist, touch walls made of wishes, and grieve like a ghost haunting its own absence— not the person I was, but the person I was supposed to become, the one who lived in the future I don't believe in, the one who knew how to be fine without the quotation marks around it.
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