Hollow

I awaken

not because I have rested,
but because punishment requires consciousness.

Sleep is a temporary exile.
Morning is the sentence.

I return to myself unwillingly,
dragged upward through layers of stale dreams
into a room that feels like an abandoned cathedral
hollow, echoing, dust suspended in pale light
like the ashes of something that once burned.

Guilt greets me first.
It is punctual.
Fear follows closely behind,
never missing its cue.

The thoughts I once tried to silence
have grown disciplined.
They line up neatly,
waiting to be reviewed
evidence in a trial where I am both defendant and judge.

Life has not merely turned grey.
It has curdled.

Color exists somewhere, I assume,
but it refuses to attach itself to me.
The sky bleeds without warmth.
The air tastes metallic.
Even memory feels drained,
like photographs left too long in the sun.

Every day loops
a corridor of identical doors,
each one opening to the same narrow room
with the same unmade bed
and the same version of me
staring back from the mirror
with less definition than the day before.

No joy.
No anticipation.
No love that does not rot under scrutiny.

Here is my sin:

I prefer the ache I recognize.

Pain, when familiar,
is manageable.
Predictable.
It does not surprise me.
It does not abandon me.

To reach for something brighter
would require hope
and hope has teeth.
It bites harder than despair
when it withdraws.

So I remain here,
in the well-mapped geography of sorrow,
tracing the same emotional fault lines
until they deepen into canyons.

But age is merciless.
It forces reflection like a mirror held too close.

I begin to ask questions
I cannot outrun:

What if I had taken the other turn?
The riskier one.
The one that trembled with possibility
instead of certainty’s suffocation?

Who would I be?
Would I recognize myself?
Would that version of me
walk lighter
or would he be equally broken,
just in a different language?

The thought constricts around my throat
like wire.
Not a dramatic rope
just thin, quiet pressure
tightening gradually
until breath becomes negotiation.

Words fail me.
They scatter like insects when exposed to light.
Language was never built
to contain the shape of this emptiness.

I stand at the edge of something unnamed.
It looks like insanity from afar,
but up close
it feels more like clarity.

I have been waiting
for rescue,
for revelation,
for some external force
to interrupt the monotony of my unraveling.

I cling to hope
like a drowning man clings to driftwood,
refusing to notice
it is waterlogged.

We betray ourselves gently.
Not in violence,
but in repetition.

In choosing the known wound
over the uncertain cure.

I wanted to feel okay.
That was the ambition.

Not extraordinary.
Not radiant.
Just… tolerable.

I studied others
their laughter,
their spontaneity,
the effortless way they occupied space
without apologizing for it.

I learned to imitate.
I curated responses.
Adjusted tones.
Softened edges.

And eventually,
I became convincing.

So convincing, in fact,
that even I believed it.

But imitation is erosion.

Each borrowed gesture
filed away something original.

Each performance
left residue.

Now I stand
with a face assembled from fragments
not quite false,
not quite real.

I cannot release who I was.
I cannot embrace who I’ve become.
I exist in between
a poorly stitched compromise.

Every path feels incorrect.
Every detour folds back into itself.
The maze stretches endlessly
fear forming the walls,
regret the floor,
guilt the ceiling pressing lower each year.

I run.
I search.
I exhaust myself.

No shortcuts.
No hidden exits.

Just the growing suspicion
that escape was never designed
for me.

And then,
in the thickest hour of night,
when silence hums louder than thought,
the realization arrives

There is no maze.

There never was.

No walls.
No architect.
No cruel design.

Only me.

I built the corridors
out of hesitation.
Laid the bricks
with postponed decisions.
Mortared them
with fear of being wrong.

The tourniquet?
My hands.

The grey sky?
My eyelids half-closed.

The exit?
Visible the entire time.

But here is the darker truth

I knew.

Somewhere beneath the rehearsed despair,
beneath the comfortable suffering,
I knew I could leave.

I simply chose not to.

Because staying
requires less courage
than living.

And so the twist is not that I am trapped
but that I am loyal
to the trap.

Morning comes again.

I awaken.

And this time,
I do not blame the maze.

I tighten the wire gently around my own throat,
call it routine,
call it realism,
call it fate

And step back into the corridor
I constructed
with deliberate hands.