I wake in a body made of borrowed air—
lungs breathing someone else’s rhythm,
a pulse that sounds rehearsed.
Even the mirror refuses to know me,
it blinks, but I do not move.
The world is still happening—
flowers burning with color,
laughter spilling from open mouths,
time unwinding like silk.
But I stand outside it all,
a ghost in a glass garden,
watching the light pass through me.
My mind floats three feet above my life,
a balloon cut loose from the child.
It watches this body
cook, walk, speak in practiced syllables—
and wonders how the mouth can smile
while the soul stays motionless.
People reach for me,
but I am a flicker in their hands—
a photograph that won’t stay focused,
a warmth that cools too fast.
I speak, but the words fall sideways,their meanings half-asleep.
Friendship becomes a country
I’ve forgotten the language of,
and every bridge I build collapses
under the weight of distance I can’t name.
There is no violence here,
just the quiet cruelty of endurance—
to be alive enough to ache,
but too hollow to feel the living.
Still, I collect the small miracles:
the hum of rain on windows,
the tremor of dawn through curtains,
the soft defiance of still being here.
I think that must count for something—
to keep breathing
in the absence of belonging,
to bloom, even faintly,
in the dirt between life and death.

Author’s Note: This poem is the quiet anatomy of despair—how the mind can drift
from the body and still pretend to live. It is not about dying, but about the strange
half-life that comes after you’ve forgotten how to feel. There’s a fragile kind of
beauty in survival, even when it tastes like absence.