the specter that is left

7:52pm April 3

It warns me, like a scream so loud in an empty neighborhood street.

I lay in stillness, while the walls cave in. Dreaming days and waking nightmares.

It took my limbs, it feeds on me. It always wants more. No part is safe.

The more I fight it, the bigger the feast. An unsatiable hunger that never leaves.

A gnawing ache, lives in every corner of me.

With each little movement I lose the fight. But how can this war be won, frozen in eternity?

Motionless, left to be devoured by the uninvited that made my body its home.

I knew that saying out loud if you were going to make me eat glass too, you were going to feel challenged and I was going to pay for standing up to you.

I knew that looking at you straight in the eyes instead of looking down like you were used to I was going to feel your wrath again.

I look at past moments and how they seem so far away yet feel so near. Time is frozen, and I am still here. I never moved on from the rupture of my soul. I died that day, yet life moved on for most. I'm still a specter moving through the corridors of this desolate and windowless library. I hide behind unread words and the shadows of unseen moments, forcefully swallowing scenes that run through my mind uninvited. My spirit was robbed by an innocent smile pressed against their face.

I trusted empty vessels dressed up as buckets of crystalline rivers, drinking from them, trying to quench the desert drought of my soul, only for them to devour my small puddles of glee. You see, back then, I was a small oasis—one that gave its last drops to satiate the most thirsty. I was the stop for parched souls to rejuvenate and cleanse while my pure waters were muddied and forgotten. This barren oasis only wished to be replenished and cared for.

I was consumed and left to dry. I'm here in the middle of this desert, waiting for a small cloud to feed me; my seedlings are starved and fading. The sand embraces me. Time is running out.

I still remember running from room to room. Four years of frantically closing windows, trying to escape the fumes, trying to stop them from coming in. The coughing, my chest in pain, the lack of air, and the desperation. The feeling of hopelessness knowing I could never leave.

The air was always so thick, the mold tearing through my belongings, taking the little things I had left. But it wanted more; it wanted my body and thrived on everything that made me happy. I lost my health, my hobbies, my clothes, and my peace. That moldy, fucking house.

That moldy, fucking house where the trucks couldn't stop blasting their horns at any moment of the day. No naps were taken peacefully; loud truck noises competed with the neighbors' music to see who could be the most obnoxious. The smell of piss and shit creeping from the neighbors' dogs, the rivers of ammonia and animal waste going down the stairs at 3 in the afternoon, sometimes at 5, and multiple times a day at 10 PM. The running to close the windows. That fucking running.