romu.

Introduction.

This is my writing space for poetry and vents. It functions as a personal archive. Nothing here is curated for an audience or followers. Everything exists as documentation of my own internal workings.

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Content Overview.

✧ Poetry. ✧ Journal entries. ✧ Fragments / Drafts / Unfinished writing. ✧ Vents.

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Tag System.

✦ #hallowed catharsis Unfiltered writing. My raw and unedited emotions.

✦ #spilled communion Processed writing. Trying to make meaning through poems and convey my feelings in a way that is safe.

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Personal Information.

Name: Romulus, Commander, or RJ. Pronouns: It/Its. Ask for others. Age: 20. Languages: My writing will be in English. However I also speak French, Guyanese Creole, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and Farsi.

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Boundaries.

I am a dog. I do have other forms as well, but primarily I am canine. I am a masc dog, in the sense of being a rabid stray you see in an alleyway and refer to as male. I am also a dead thing. However you choose to interpret that is fine. I am not alive, and I do not exist. Do not perceive me as human, or refer to me as a person in any way. 2. Do not flirt with me. 3. No DNI, I block freely. Use common sense, and do not be an idiot.

⛧⋆✧⋆⛧ Notes.

This is a personal writing archive. Interpretation is open, but context remains private. Nothing here is roleplay, aesthetic performance, or fictional character work. Content may shift in tone depending on emotional state or timing.

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I have another blog. I don't keep myself anonymous on this one, so it's fine if you recognize me from there. But don't bring up my content on that blog over here.

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They cry for the Saviour with blood still wet upon their hands. They cry from cathedral steps polished smooth by generations of kneeling. They cry from battlefields, from hospital beds, from burning cities and collapsing homes. They cry from beneath mountains of grief so immense that even language bends beneath its weight.

And still they cry. Saviour. Saviour. Saviour.

The word rises like incense through the centuries, carried by desperate mouths that no longer remember where it came from. The old stories have been repeated too many times. Passed from trembling hands to trembling hands until the edges wore away. The miracles remain. The symbols remain. The rituals remain. But the face has vanished.

The name has become larger than the thing it once belonged to. Now they worship the absence itself. They build altars to memory. They kneel before echoes. They recite prayers whose meanings have long since bled from the pages.

The faithful gather beneath stained glass and raise their voices toward heaven, yet no two of them are calling for the same salvation. One begs for justice. Another begs for vengeance. One begs for mercy. Another begs for permission to destroy. Each claims certainty. Each points toward the sky. Each insists the Saviour stands behind their shoulder.

And somewhere beneath their voices, buried beneath doctrine and prophecy and fear, the original cry remains trapped like a body beneath the ruins. Because they no longer seek the Saviour. They seek relief. They seek absolution. They seek a hand to lift responsibility from their shoulders and place meaning neatly upon their suffering. The Savior has become a vessel large enough to contain every human hunger.

Every wound. Every obsession. Every terror of being abandoned in a universe that refuses to answer. So they continue to call. Year after year. Century after century. The cathedrals decay. The scriptures yellow. The statues crack. The names change. Yet the cry survives. Saviour. Saviour. Saviour. And I wonder if the tragedy was never that the Saviour failed to come.

I wonder if the tragedy is that the Savior arrived long ago and was forgotten beneath the weight of everything people needed Him to be. Now the faithful stand among the ruins of their own devotion, weeping for a face they would not recognize if it stood before them. The bells ring. The candles burn. The prayers rise.

And no one remembers who they are waiting for.

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Sometimes I think people look at me the way they look at a suffering dog. Not with hatred. Hatred would require investment. Not with fear. Fear would imply I possessed the power to matter. But with that peculiar mixture of discomfort and pity reserved for things that have become difficult to witness. The kind that silently asks whether keeping something alive is still an act of kindness.

I imagine them seeing all the wrong parts first. The nervous pacing. The exposed ribs. The old wounds chewed open again and again because healing never seemed to take. The way I flinch from open hands while simultaneously starving for them. I imagine them growing tired.

Tired of the noise. Tired of the need. Tired of watching me circle the same griefs like an animal wearing a path into the dirt. And sometimes, in my darker moments, I convince myself that people are not wishing for my recovery at all. They are wishing for resolution. An ending. A conclusion neat enough to free them from the burden of witnessing whatever this is.

Not because they are cruel. Because they are human. Suffering is exhausting even from a distance. And eventually every tragedy risks becoming familiar. Familiar tragedies rarely receive the same tenderness as new ones. So I begin to feel monstrous in my persistence.

I am something lingering long after it should have disappeared. Like an animal sitting faithfully beside a door that will never open again, growing thinner and quieter with each passing season while strangers debate whether hope itself has become a form of suffering. The truth is that nobody says these things aloud.

Nobody has ever looked me in the eyes and spoken them. Yet the fear remains. It follows me from room to room. It settles beside me in conversations. It transforms silence into accusation and distance into verdict.

And before long I become both the abandoned animal and the crowd gathered around it, inventing judgments that were never spoken and mourning losses that have not yet occurred.

Perhaps that is the cruelest part. Not what other people think of me. But how quickly I volunteer to become my own executioner. How eagerly I place words in other mouths. How often I mistake my fear of being unwanted for proof that I am. And still I am here.

Mangled, frightened, loyal to a life that has not always been kind to me. Still waiting. Still breathing. Still refusing to lie down.

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I spent months trying to determine where the fracture began. Whether it started in a bottle, in a prescription label folded neatly inside a paper bag, or somewhere much older, waiting patiently for the right combination of chemicals to unlock the door.

Everyone wanted a timeline. A clear beginning. A single moment they could point toward and say: there. That was the mistake. But nothing arrived that easily. The world simply became unfamiliar. Colors felt louder. Silences felt brighter. I began collecting meaning from places where meaning had never existed before.

Streetlights flickering at midnight. Conversations overheard through thin walls. Songs on the radio. Numbers on clocks. Everything seemed connected and deliberate. The universe leaned close enough for me to hear its breathing. Or at least I thought it did.

The terrifying thing is not losing reality. The terrifying thing is believing you have finally found it. Believing that everyone else is asleep while you alone have been granted access to some hidden machinery beneath the world.

I felt brilliant. I felt chosen. I felt watched. I felt hunted. I felt holy. I felt damned.

Every certainty arrived carrying its opposite. Every revelation rotted into paranoia the moment I touched it. And all the while I continued searching for an explanation large enough to contain what was happening to me. Maybe it was the medication. Maybe it was the combination. Maybe it was exhaustion wearing another mask. Maybe my mind is simply more fragile than I would like to admit. I still do not know.

What I know is that there came a morning when the fog finally began to lift and I looked back across the wreckage of my own thoughts like someone surveying a city after a fire. The prophecies were gone. The patterns were gone. The certainty was gone. Only embarrassment remained.

And grief. So much grief. Because some part of me had genuinely believed every impossible thing. Some part of me had built a cathedral from static and called it truth. And when it collapsed, it took pieces of me with it. Sometimes I still find them scattered in old memories. Fragments of conviction. Ashes of certainty. Ghosts of a person who could no longer tell the difference between a sign and a coincidence. I gather them quietly. I let the wind take them. And I remind myself that survival does not always look like triumph.

Sometimes it looks like learning to trust your own reflection again.

They always talk about hunger or needfulness when they talk about addiction, but nobody ever talks about relief. Nobody talks about the allure of silence. The way a storm can rage for years inside a person's skull until they begin to forget that other people normally wake up without immediately bracing for impact. Nobody mentions the fact that every thought becomes tangled in another thought until the mind resembles a room full of snarled wires throwing sparks into the dark.

Then there is the memory of quiet. A counterfeit quiet, perhaps. A quiet purchased on borrowed time, perhaps one that arrived wearing a mask and carrying a knife behind its back. But quiet nonetheless. And sometimes that is enough to make the memory dangerous.

I remember believing I felt calmer. I remember mistaking numbness for peace, mistaking distance for healing, mistaking the absence of noise for the presence of safety. Everything became smooth around the edges. Every fear seemed farther away. Every wound looked smaller beneath the artificial light. I did not realize I was standing inside a burning house simply because the smoke had made me too drowsy to notice the flames.

Sobriety is cruel because it returns everything intact. The noise. The grief. The unfinished conversations. The parts of myself I spent so long trying to outrun. Nothing disappears. It simply waits. And some days I catch myself romanticizing the lie. Not because I want destruction or oblivion. Rather because there are moments when exhaustion paints old poisons in holy colours and convinces me they were ever capable of salvation. That is the trick of it. The memory edits itself. It removes the shaking hands and leaves only stillness. It removes the emptiness and leaves only relief. It removes the cost and leaves only the receipt. But memory is a false prophet. I know what waited beyond that calm. I know what stood behind the curtain. I know the price demanded by every false god that promises silence in exchange for devotion. And still there are nights when I miss the illusion. Still there are nights when the storm becomes so loud that I find myself staring toward old altars and remembering how easy it once felt to kneel. But remembrance is not worship. Temptation is not surrender. The thought arrives. The thought lingers. The thought leaves. Yet I remain. And I feel calmer on cocaine.

⛧ ─── ⋆ ─── ⛧ There is something deeply unnatural about moving through the world untouched by genuine care for so long that you begin to feel less like a person and more like an object misplaced. Not hated, not even noticed enough for hatred. Just continually passed over, as though there is something fundamentally unremarkable about your suffering, something too quiet or too strange to interrupt the movement of other people’s lives.

I think that is what makes it unbearable. Pain at least implies contact. Rejection implies consideration. Even cruelty requires a kind of attention. But indifference is emptier than all of them.

Indifference is watching conversations continue as though your silence did not alter the room at all. It is learning how to disappear without physically leaving. It is realizing that if you stopped speaking first, stopped reaching first, stopped dragging your own body toward connection over and over again, entire relationships would collapse soundlessly into dust because you were the only thing holding them upright to begin with.

After enough time, it changes the architecture of you. You stop interpreting affection as something freely given and begin treating it like anomalies, brief and accidental events that cannot be trusted to return. Every act of kindness becomes suspicious. Every soft word sounds rehearsed. Every moment of warmth feels temporary before it has even fully arrived.

And beneath all of it grows this terrible, festering question: what is wrong with me that nobody has ever stayed long enough to love me without being asked?

Eventually you become so accustomed to emotional abandonment that you start preparing for it before anything has even begun. You rehearse your own disappearance in advance. You detach before others can detach first. You become cold, or desperate, or impossibly accommodating, twisting yourself into whatever shape seems least likely to be discarded, and still the loneliness remains sitting at the center of you like a stone too heavy to remove. The horrible part is not simply being uncared for. It is what prolonged neglect does to the mind afterward.

It teaches you to doubt every kindness. It turns love into something mythological, something that happens vividly to other people while you stand outside the glass watching. It leaves you starving in ways that embarrass you, reaching for scraps of attention with the intensity of someone who has mistaken survival for greed.

And still, despite all of it, some pathetic hopeful part of me continues to ache toward others anyway, continues to crave tenderness with the devotion of a wounded animal crawling back toward the same open hand that once struck it.

Maybe that is the cruelest thing loneliness does. Not that it empties you. But that it leaves you full of love with nowhere safe to place it.

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There are moments where I feel something inside myself go dark in a way that is almost physical, like a house losing power room by room until only the emergency lights remain and everything familiar begins to look wrong beneath them.

It happens almost unnoticeably at first. It feels like something vital has stepped away from the centre of me and left only instinct pacing in its place. In that emptiness, I become cruel with frightening ease. My words are sharpened before I even understand that I am reaching for them. Every insecurity becomes outwardly visible. Every weakness becomes a target painted bright against the dark. I speak as if I am trying to wound the world before it notices how badly I am already bleeding beneath my own skin. And the worst part is how natural it feels while it is happening. Similar to watching an animal cornered long enough that it finally begins to bare its teeth at anything that moves. Inevitable.

In those moments, I do not feel like a person capable of softness. I feel like hunger personified, and it is wearing my face. So I say things that should never be said. I twist tenderness into weapons. I turn silence into punishment. I make people flinch and then pretend not to notice because noticing would mean admitting I understood exactly what I was doing all along.

But eventually it passes. The emptiness recedes slowly, like floodwater draining from a ruined place, and I return to myself piece by piece with the horror of someone waking to find blood on their hands they cannot remember spilling. Then comes the sickness. Not guilt in its cleanest form, because guilt suggests something simple enough to confess and resolve. This is uglier than that.

It is the unbearable awareness of having watched yourself become unrecognizable while still fully conscious inside it. The realization that cruelty spoken from pain does not transform into kindness simply because the pain was real. I replay every word afterward until they rot inside me.

The silences. The tone. The precise places where I knew exactly how to hurt and chose to press harder anyway. And I think that is what truly terrifies me. Not that I become cruel when empty, but that the cruelty always knows where to go. As though somewhere deep beneath all the softer parts of me there is still something starving and furious, something that mistakes destruction for relief and leaves me behind afterward to mourn what it touched.

⛧ ─── ⋆ ─── ⛧ I think God lives in the quiet things. Like the way I hold my breath when something beautiful gets too close, as if I am afraid of staining it. As if I have always been something that ruins.

I learned early that devotion looks a lot like hunger. Knees pressed into cold floors, palms open like wounds waiting to be filled. Nothing ever comes gently to me through this. It is always this gnawing, relentless reaching, like trying to claw light out of my own ribcage and call it faith.

I used to pray, not for forgiveness, but for permission. To want, to take, to keep something soft without breaking it open just to see how it works. But every good thing I have ever touched ends up sacred in the wrong way. Preserved, untouchable, dead before I can ruin it properly.

Like I am not meant to have, only to witness. Only to stand there, hands shaking, bloodless while something holy passes through me without stopping.

⛧ ─── ⋆ ─── ⛧ I have a thought that arrives strangely calm, almost ordinary in the way it settles into the background of everything else in my head. Like it has always been there and only now decided it wanted to be noticed.

It does not feel like fear. It does not even feel like desire in the way people assume these things must feel. Not active, or chosen. It feels more like observation, like watching a distant horizon and noticing that it does not move no matter how long you stare at it.

Sometimes it appears in quiet moments, when everything else in my life has finally stopped asking for attention, and what is left behind is just the weight of existing. In those moments, the thought does not come with urgency. It comes with stillness, and that stillness can be mistaken for comfort when everything else has been too loud for too long.

I have learned how easily my exhaustion can begin to speak in the same language as certainty. How it can take something abstract and slowly turn it into something that feels inevitable, something already decided by fate, something that no longer needs to be questioned because questioning itself takes energy that has already been spent elsewhere.

It is not that I want anything. It is more that my mind, which has carried too much for too long, begins to imagine what it would mean to stop carrying it at all, and in that imagining it reaches for the simplest shape it can find, even if that shape is not truly what is being asked for underneath it.

What is actually there is something harder to name. There is a deep fatigue that does not leave when rest is given, a sense of continuing long after the part of me that explains what continuing is has gone quiet, and a strange experience of still being here.

And even then, I keep turning the thought over without ever fully allowing it to blossom. There is no arrival point in it, no clean edge where anything resolves, only the ongoing fact of being aware of a thought that tries to frame itself as an ending while my body continues to prove otherwise simply by existing.

⛧ ─── ⋆ ─── ⛧ I stopped calling it rejection. Using that word implies there is a door that once considered opening. This was never that kind of architecture. It was more like weather. Something that exists whether or not I stand inside it, that moves through me without noticing I am there.

Absence is not quite it. Nor is abandonment. Perhaps acceptance. A fixture that does not change shape for anything that looks up at it. And still, there is too much of me that continues to offer itself. It does not know how to stop becoming warmth, and ends up scorching me. It gathers in the ribs, in the throat, in the hands that remember reaching even after they were told not to.

I have accepted that I cannot be loved. But acceptance is not the same as emptiness.

It does not remove what is already growing. It only makes it sound quieter when it breaks through the surface. So it spills elsewhere. Into my thoughts, into my words, and into places that do not know how to refuse it. And I think that is what hurts. Not the lack of return, but the surplus that has nowhere sanctioned to go.

Love, left without a destination, does not disappear. It circulates, and echoes. It turns inward until even silence begins to feel too loud.

Every mutt with their little halo before me ran forward. Tails wagging, tongues lolling, eyes soft with the stupid beautiful trust only they are born with.

Their mud-stained paws crossed the holy ground without fear of punishment. The angels laughed. They called them good creatures. Faithful creatures. Beloved creatures. One by one, they vanished into the light. I stayed at the threshold.

My paws were black with something that would not wash out. My teeth were too sharp. My breathing was too ragged. Blood dripped from my maw. Something feral and feverish dragged behind me like a chain woven directly into my ribs.

The others would not look at me for long. It was out of instinct. Animals know when something has gone rotten.

Saint Peter knelt anyway. Gentle hand beneath my jaw. His thumb brushed over old scars, over the place where my devotion had curdled into hunger.

“You loved,” he said softly. I almost laughed. I loved like a vow spoken with teeth behind it. Devotion that turned into hunger when it went unanswered. Something holy that was handled too long by trembling hands. Until it learned how to break.

Behind him, heaven glowed warm. But it did not open for me. It only watched. Heaven doesn't open for the dogs who learned too well how to stain whatever they lay their filthy paws upon. It is judgment that does not end when the sky does. All dogs go to heaven.