When the mind collapses inward, the soul searches for somewhere to hold on.
Where am I? In what fold of the world did I come undone without noticing?
The years have slipped through me like water between my fingers, leaving behind only the warm hollow of what once was—a hollow that throbs like a wounded animal. This helplessness bursts inside me, a storm without sky, a lightning bolt that never reaches the ground. I don’t know whether to hold this trembling close or release it before it burns me to ash.
There was a time when I was wind—moving forward without asking permission, passing through doors and fears as if they were made of air. Now I am a stone sunken at the bottom of a murky river, unmoving while the current circles and forgets me. The walls have grown tall, ancient, and covered in roots, and I’ve become the traveler who lost her map in the middle of the forest. How do you find your way back when even your own name has dissolved on your tongue?
Sometimes I want to run until my shadow disappears. To escape myself as one flees from a burning house—without looking back.
This skin feels heavy with echoes; this sadness clings like ivy around my heart. I want to evaporate in a breath, turn into mist so I no longer feel the sharpness of every emotion that cuts through me. I want nothing to touch me, nothing to claim me, nothing to remind me that I’m still here.
I don’t know where I am… And yet I still want to disappear.
It feels like walking through a house in ruins, where every room creaks with memory and every hallway ends in a question with no door to escape through. Frustration tightens around my chest like an iron corset: I can’t, I don’t reach, I fail to give. To grow, I need something that hasn’t arrived—a key I can’t find, a light I’m not sure is mine or borrowed from another sky.
And then I see myself falling.
Not like someone who stumbles, but like someone collapsing inward.
Falling in spirals, like a leaf searching for ground that never comes. A slow, endless, soundless descent—where even the void refuses to offer an edge to hold on to.
Where am I… And how does one cross the threshold of an abyss that lives only inside, yet swallows me as if I were its only meal?
Nel Duarte
Calgary, Nov 27, 2025 12:57 pm