Serenity

•A R T•

[chcrrycosmos]

! INTRODUCTION POST !

Welcome to my page!

Grab a snack and some tea, stay as long as you like!

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Hi, you can call me Serenity Jay!:)

This page is basically for my poems, photography, etc!

My messages will always be open to you, I want this to be a safe space for all.

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Now, let me tell you some things about me.

I'm 18, single, and a leo!

My MBTI is INTJ!

I have multiple mental illnesses, which include depression, anxiety, bpd, maladaptive daydreaming, etc. (So please be patient.)

Happily Pro-choice

I'm apart of the LGBTQ! (demisexual, pansexual)

I'm not religious, but I was raised southern baptist and I go to church just to have something to do on Sundays! so this page is 100% safe for all! :)

I'm very much a cat person, I have 1 bearded dragon, 5 cats, and 3 dogs. (they coexist)

I enjoy cooking and baking, so I can give y'all some good recipes :)

I'm currently not going to college

I've only been to 3 states! (not including the one I live in!)

I've never left the usa!

I'm a listener, but when I do talk I can NOT stop, so I can seem self-centered.

My favorite season is Fall! (crunchy leaves!)

I'm a book hoarder.

I'm horrified of ladybugs.

I listen to all types of music, including rock, metal, pop, country, etc! So please don't hesitate to talk to me about your favorite groups!

Currently, that's all I can think of to share with you all!

Messages are always open!

Drink water, please try to eat!

I'm so proud of you!

[chcrrycosmos]

She’s already there when I walk in—

Slouched over a half-empty glass,

Watching the ice melt

Like it owes her something.

The bartender knows better

Than to ask questions.

He slides me a drink

And nods towards her

With a look that says: good luck.

She doesn’t look up.

Just says,

“Been wondering when you’d show.”

I sit, not close—

Not yet—

And she laughs, low,

A sound like a drawer slamming shut.

She looks like me,

But not really.

Too still,

Like a paused film.

Eyes that never blink

But never stop seeing.

“Anger,” she says,

As if I’d forgotten her name.

But I hadn’t.

Not since the broken mug,

The slammed door,

The words flung like lit matches.

Not since the silence after.

She sips.

“Funny thing,

How you keep trying to lock me out

Like I don’t live here too.”

I don’t answer.

She doesn’t need me to.

Outside, the rain taps the window,

Steady, restrained.

Unlike her.

Unlike what I’ve buries

Beneath logic and apologies\

And the brittle smiles I wear at work.

“You think I run things,”

She says,

“But I remember what you swallow

Just to make peace.”

She taps the glass.

“You’re always pouring me back in.”

We sit like that

For a long time.

Two ghosts in a room full of mirrors.

When I leave,

She doesn’t follow.

Just lifts the glass in a slow salute.

But I know I’ll see her again.

Same bar.

Same seat.

And maybe next time,

I’ll sit closer.

[chcrrycosmos]

It rests in a cedar box,

Tucked into the folds of time—

A locket no longer gold,

But softened into a dull warmth,

Like the hands that once clasped it.

Great-grandmother wore it

The day she left Warsaw,

Braiding hope into her hair,

Pressing the mistake to her chest

As if it could remember

What she could not bear to forget.

Inside,

A photograph the size of a thumbprint—

Faded eyes sarong back

With the patience of stone.

They have seen wars come and go,

Babies born in winter,

Names whispered into dusk.

It passed to her daughter

On a summer morning

Slick with dew and grief.

The chain broke once—

Mended with a fisherman’s knot

By hands too calloused to be gentle,

But still, they tried.

My mother kept it

In the kitchen drawer

With scissors and twine—

Said it made her feel

Like someone was watching,

Not unkindly,

But with the weight of knowing

What must be carried.

Now it sits in my palm

Cool as river stone,

Quiet as an unfinished prayer.

I wear it on days

I cannot name what I’m missing—

And I feel her,

And her,

And her—

Like echoes,

Walking beside me

Without footsteps.

[chcrrycosmos]

November 2nd, 1846 Written in near-dark, by a hand that no longer shakes

My Almost, My Once, My Still—

This may be the last. Not because I have run out of words, but because the words have become unnecessary. They sit now not in my throat but in the walls, in the floorboards, in the fibers of my clothes. I breathe through them. I bleed them without injury.

You have become quiet in me. Not absent. Only quiet. Like the moon behind heavy cloud. Still there— but not shining for me anymore.

I do not look for you in reflections. I do not expect to hear your voice between the closing of books or the bending of trees in the wind.

I simply carry you. Like marrow. Like a second spine. Like a name I do not say aloud, but keep on the inside of my teeth just in case.

There was a time I wrote to reach you. Then, to remember. Then, to survive. Now I write because the motion of it feels like prayer.

I do not know if I love you as I once did. Love, at some point, becomes indistinguishable from persistence. From habit. From gravity.

I only know that there are parts of me which still lean in your direction, even in sleep.

I have stopped asking whether you think of me. I imagine you are well. Or if you are not, that someone’s hand is resting gently on your back as mine never did. It is not envy. It is hope, worn so thin it has become translucent. But still— it holds.

Outside, the leaves are falling. Each one seems to land softer than the last. I think of you each time. Not because they remind me of you. But because everything still does.

This letter has no questions. No pleas. No desperation.

It simply is. Like a breath. Like the space beside a pillow. Like the end of winter before the thaw.

I fold it now, though there is no one to send it to. I place it with the others, beneath the boards, in the quiet place where your name still lives.

No signature this time. If you’ve read this far, you already know—

I was always and only yours.

[chcrrycosmos]

August 27th, 1846 Written in the stillness before dawn

My Beloved— or whatever remains of that word,

I no longer begin with “dearest.” That word feels too warm, and I have grown cold in places no fire can reach.

I do not know if this letter will find you, or if I write now only to the echo, the pale shimmer of your outline on the wall where I last imagined you standing.

Time has lost its shape here. The days bleed together— not red, but grey. A soft, suffocating grey that sits in my lungs and weighs down every thought.

I no longer know what season it is. The window is always closed. The light, when it visits, stays only long enough to remind me how long it’s been since I last saw your face without breaking.

I do not ask you to return. That request died with the second letter, and was buried with the third. Now, I ask only this— that if you are ever walking, and the wind moves in that strange, sudden way as if something unseen has just passed through you, that you think of me for one breath’s width.

That would be enough.

There is a strange peace now. Not the kind that heals, but the kind that settles. Like dust on a table that will never again be touched.

I dream no more. Even you have left my sleep. And perhaps that is mercy.

I feel less each day. But what remains is still you.

You are not a thought anymore— you are an environment. A climate within me. My blood flows through the geography of your absence, mapping silence like rivers once mapped the edges of known worlds.

I am not angry. Not even sorrowful. There is no poetry left in what I feel for you. Only shape. Only pressure. Like the weight of a body in a bed that has not been shared in years.

I leave this letter beneath the floorboards, with the others. I do not sign my name. I’m no longer sure I remember it.

But you will know who wrote it. If you ever read them, you will know. Because no one else could have loved you so completely that they vanished.

In silence, in dust, in devotion,

—

[chcrrycosmos]

June 11th, 1846 Written beneath the window where the light no longer falls

My Dearest,

You must forgive me again, though I have no idea if the first apology ever reached you. Perhaps none of these have. Perhaps you have long since forgotten me, or worse— remember me only in the way one remembers an old wound: dull, unremarkable, no longer aching but never quite gone.

I fear I am no longer writing to you but to the shape you left in my mind. I have preserved you too long, like a flower pressed between the pages of a book no one reads anymore. And yet the scent of you remains. I smell it in the rain. I taste it in the bitterness of morning. I breathe it when I whisper your name into the walls, as though the plaster might carry it back to you somehow.

The world outside continues, I am told. The days go on like horses in fog— tired and slow, but relentless. People speak to me, and I nod, and I answer, and none of them know that I am not inside this body anymore. You are.

I have not been able to look into a mirror for several weeks. The face there stares too intently— not because it is haunted, but because it is empty. Your absence lives there now. It studies me.

Last night, I heard your voice behind the walls. Not in a dream. Not in madness. I heard you, clear as my own thoughts. You said only one thing: “Let go.”

But how does one let go of the blood inside their veins? Of the hands they reach with? Of the ache that is more real than anything the sun ever touches?

I have tried. My God, I have tried.

I no longer write for you. I write for the ghost who wears your smile. I write because I fear if I do not, my mind will rot from the inside with all the unspoken things you will never hear.

I can no longer tell if this is love or possession. You have become a religion I cannot leave even as it destroys me. I kneel every day to your memory and rise no cleaner, no wiser, only thinner where my soul used to be.

They tell me I should burn these letters. They say it would be a kindness. I believe them. But still— I fold this page. I seal it.

I place it beside the others in the box beneath the floorboards, where even the rats no longer go.

If one day, by some cruel or miraculous design, you find them— you will see the shape of my undoing. You will know how much of me was given, was emptied, was carved out just to hold the thought of you.

I end this letter as I began the first, with no expectation of reply. Only this: that somewhere, you still breathe.

And that the breath carries my name, if only for a moment.

Yours until forgetting,

—S.J.

[chcrrycosmos]

May 3rd, 1846 From the quiet hours, past midnight

My Dearest,

Forgive me. It is late again, and again I write. Not because I expect you to answer, but because I no longer know how to be silent when the thought of you fills every room I enter.

I do not seek comfort— what comfort could remain when even sleep now trembles under your name? Last night, I dreamt I held your hand, and woke with my own clenched so tightly it bore crescent wounds from my nails. Flesh remembers what the world will not give.

There is no poetry left in me. Only this— this endless turning of your presence in my mind, like a prayer said too often until it becomes noise, then fever, then devotion again.

I see you in the tilt of another’s head, in the crease of a glove folded too carefully, in the way dust hangs in morning light— as if your breath stirred it. How strange, that a body can be absent and still feel heavier than anything I carry.

Do you recall the day by the river, when you laughed at nothing, simply because the wind caught your scarf like a banner from some distant, unseen place? I think of that laugh more than I should admit. It echoes where my reason once stood. I fear it has made a cathedral of my mind in which only you may kneel.

It is not love, is it? Not this. This is some other thing— love corrupted, stretched thin by time and silence until it frays, until it wraps around the throat like a ribbon drawn too tight. Yet even in its strangling, I do not want it to stop.

I write to you, though you will never read this, because I must place your name somewhere, anywhere, to keep from carving it into my own skin.

You have become the question that wakes with me, the ache that sips my tea, the shadow I thank when I find myself breathing without knowing why.

And still— if you were to appear at my door this very moment, I fear I would forget how to speak. I have rehearsed the words so many times they no longer feel real. Only you remain.

And so, I enclose nothing. No lock of hair. No trinket. Only this page, thin as hope, creased by a shaking hand.

I am not well. But I am yours, entirely, helplessly, unforgivably.

Always waiting,

—S.J.

[chcrrycosmos]

April 17th, 1846 From my writing desk by candlelight

My Dearest— or perhaps, my Undone Soul,

Though I have not penned this to post, I must write, if only to feel the ink carry a weight that my body can no longer bear alone. Forgive the disarray of my thoughts, for I have not slept well— not in days, perhaps weeks. Your image walks too boldly through my dreams, and worse— does not leave me in waking.

I confess, I did not think the mind capable of such uninterrupted devotion. Were you a melody, I might at least hum you aloud, share your tune with the walls. But no— you are silence made sacred, a quiet presence stitched into every moment, even the ones where I pretend not to notice.

I have become incapable of turning a page in a book without wondering if your hand might have once touched its edge. I gaze at the ink of others and see only the space where your handwriting might be.

Even the fire has grown cruel, for it casts your shape into the shadows of every corner. And I, a fool of warmth, lean closer as though the dark might whisper your name.

When I eat, I taste nothing. For my appetite has been replaced with a hunger far less merciful. It is not for your body alone— though Heaven forgive me, that too— but for your gaze, your laugh, your smallest sigh that breaks the silence like glass.

Tell me, if you can, how it is that time still moves while you remain as constant as breath in my chest. Have I cursed myself by loving too deeply, or have I simply allowed the truth to rise like floodwater?

You exist behind the lids of my eyes. You have become the space between my heartbeats, the hesitation before I speak, the echo at the end of every prayer.

When I walk, it is not to reach a place— it is to chase the memory of your footfall in gravel, to follow the ghost of a fragrance you once wore like armor.

Do you think of me? I ask not out of hope— I dare not possess so fragile a thing— but out of awe. To know that you walk the same Earth as I, and that thought itself does not collapse beneath the weight of you— is miracle enough.

If I am to die one day, and surely I will, I ask only this: let it be on a day I thought of you. Which is to say— any day.

Every day.

Always.

I remain, not wholly mine any longer, but something else entirely—

Yours in thought, in ache, in eternity,

—S.J.

[chcrrycosmos]

They didn’t stay inside. They weren’t content with shadows, with damp breath in hidden halls, with flickering memories behind rotted doors.

They followed.

I left the room beneath the forest, but it did not stay behind. It unfolded—quietly, patiently— through cracks in thought, through dreams I didn’t remember having, until I began to see the walls in places they did not belong.

First, in mirrors. Then, behind closed eyes. Then, in the reflection on the bus window— that flicker of motion where no one sat.

They learned how to move through me. Not around. Not beside. Through.

It began with the trees. They grew in the corners of rooms that should not have space for growth. Pale bark cracked open to reveal soft red beneath, beating slow, in time with my pulse. Their branches reached for me, even when I wasn’t near.

I burned one. Its ashes hummed. In the morning, it stood again in the kitchen. This time, it knew my name.

The door came next. Always closed. Always somewhere different— in the hallway, in the fridge, behind my eyelids when I blinked. It never opened. It never needed to.

Something else did.

They slithered out like smoke made of teeth. Like whispers that stick to the spine. They didn't speak— they revealed.

They showed me my house rotting from the inside. Not wood, not brick— me. My hands began to peel. My voice cracked, splitting into two tones: mine, and the other.

I watched my own reflection reach out first. Its fingers hit the glass— no barrier. It touched my face and something inside me turned to look.

They walked freely after that. Not always visible— worse. Felt.

A pressure behind the eyes. A hunger in the bones. I stopped being alone. I stopped being only me.

They followed me into work. Stood behind the copier. Breathed through the phone. Laughed when I answered with a voice that wasn’t quite mine.

I bled once, from the mouth. Thick, black fluid. It didn’t hurt. That was what scared me. It felt like relief.

I stopped dreaming. Or maybe I never woke up.

I saw the room again last night. Not in the forest. Not in my mind.

In the middle of my apartment. Perfect, pulsing, patient. And everything I had run from stood in it— watching.

The mirror-thing, wearing my face like a soft coat. The door, open now, showing stars that moved too quickly. The tree, cracked and bleeding joy.

I tried to run, but my legs had different plans. They walked forward. Smiling.

The things did not touch me. Not yet. They just waited. Because now, I understand.

They don’t need to chase.

They are not predators.

They are roots. And I have stopped struggling. And the soil is warm.

[chcrrycosmos]

There is a place behind the trees where the wind does not touch, where even light forgets to fall. You will not find it on a map. It does not wait to be discovered— it waits to be recognized.

You arrive without memory of how you began. Your footprints do not hold behind you. The woods are quiet, but not peaceful. There is a pressure in the silence, like breath held too long beneath something vast.

The trees are wrong in small ways. Their bark peels in the shape of fingers. Their roots tremble when you pass. Some lean slightly toward you, like listeners. Like witnesses.

You follow no path. But something beneath your thoughts guides you. Not a voice— an arrangement. As if your choices had already been made long before your birth.

At the forest’s center, the air grows heavier. Each inhale feels like swallowing something alive. Not quite solid. Not quite yours.

There is a clearing, circular and exact, as if carved by purpose rather than time. At its center: a door, freestanding, with no frame, no wall, no hinges— just a shape in space that should not hold.

Its surface is black, but not empty. You see yourself there, but not now— not fully. Not alone.

You place your hand on it because you already have.

The door opens inward. You follow. You do not close it behind you. You never could.

Inside, the walls pulse. Not with light, but with knowing. They know you. They have been you.

You walk through narrow corridors that shift behind you. The floor is flesh beneath dust. You do not slip— you sink.

Your name begins to flicker at the edge of your tongue. You try to remember your mother’s face, a favorite song, the sound of laughter. All of it fades like paper left in rain.

The rooms change shape based on your thoughts, but not kindly. You think of warmth— the walls begin to sweat. You think of escape— the ceiling lowers by inches.

In one room, there is a mirror. You do not look away. The thing that stares back wears your skin too loosely. Its eyes are patient. Its mouth does not open, but still you hear it speak:

“You are not lost. You are becoming.”

Your hands tremble, but only some of them. The rest are calm. They’ve been here longer.

There are doorways that lead back to places that never existed. You pass through them anyway. Each time, something follows. Not a creature— a subtraction. Something that removes what it touches.

Eventually, you no longer fear it. Eventually, you no longer know to fear at all.

You sit in the final room, though it is not final. Only still. Only waiting.

There is a voice above you like static melting, and it asks the last question you will ever understand:

“What were you before the forgetting?”

You try to answer, but your mouth is full of soil. Or skin. Or silence.

It doesn’t matter.

The room accepts you.

You are home.

[chcrrycosmos]

There is a point in the day when you begin to feel it. Not a sound, not a shadow, but a weight, just beyond your skin.

You tell yourself it's nothing— a twitch of air, the hum of electricity, the body remembering what it has no reason to remember. Still, your hand tightens on the mug. You glance once, then twice, at the hallway that should be empty.

No one is there. Of course not. But the feeling lingers like heat after the fire is out.

It is worse at night. When the walls thin and the quiet deepens into something alive. Your home breathes beside you, but something else does, too— something quieter. Something that does not blink.

The ceiling becomes a ceiling again. The corners hold. And yet, your body knows you are not alone.

It is not a presence you can see, only a tension in the space behind you. As if your name is being thought in a language you’ve never learned, but understand anyway.

Mirrors become traitors. Windows glare. Even your own reflection begins to feel like a stranger caught mid-sentence. You start leaving the lights on not out of fear, but defiance. As if to say: “If you’re watching—look. Let’s see who stares longer.”

But it never blinks. And it never speaks.

You begin to change, slowly. Your voice becomes measured. Your laughter quieter. You flinch at nothing. Not because it’s there— but because it might be.

You stop telling people. They smile too easily, say “you need rest” with voices that don’t quite meet your eyes. They tell you it's your imagination, and you want to believe them.

But imagination doesn’t open drawers. Imagination doesn’t breathe at the edge of your hearing.

You start to wonder if it is inside you. Not something watching— but something waking. An awareness you were never meant to touch.

You think of cameras. Of God. Of algorithms, and ghosts. Of all the things you cannot see, but still obey.

You ask: What am I, if I am always observed? Where do my thoughts go once I think them?

You stop looking at the sky. You avoid your own reflection. You dream of rooms with no corners, no ceiling, only silence that does not listen back.

And even then— even in that dream— you know it is watching.

Not to harm you. Not to love you. Just to witness.

As if that were enough. As if that were everything.

[chcrrycosmos]

It hangs in a room where the light is soft, and the air carries the hush of reverence. No plaque can contain it. No guidebook explains the way it moves you. It is just color. Just form. Just the trace of a human hand dragging intention across canvas.

Yet it stops people mid-step. Draws breath away from their bodies. Not with grandeur, but with something quieter, more intimate. A kind of sorrow, perhaps, or longing without name.

A woman stands in the center, not facing us. Her back is a soft curve like the bow of a question. She stares out a window that opens onto nothing— only light, or fog, or time.

Her dress is simple. The folds of fabric speak of motion just missed— a moment before or after. Frozen between departure and hesitation. You do not know if she is waiting, or has given up.

And around her, the room is full of shadows that do not frighten. Only echo. Like the feeling of an old song you cannot place but suddenly remember how it made you feel.

People come and go. Some tilt their heads. Some move on quickly. But a few remain, caught in the soft gravity of this imagined life. Not hers— their own.

You can see it on their faces. The way their eyes lower as if searching memory. As if trying to answer a question the painting does not ask aloud.

Someone remembers a morning— a window, a silence, a mother who stood there, or a lover who left. Someone else feels the weight of time accumulating like dust in rooms they no longer enter.

And someone—quietly, without meaning to— forgives themselves.

The painting offers nothing easy. No story. No resolution. Only a mirror, disguised as a window.

And you leave it not with answers, but with something deeper— a calm, perhaps, or a wound you finally noticed. You do not cry. But you could.

And that is the painting's power— not to tell you what it means, but to remind you that you mean. That you have stood in shadow, waited by windows, longed without knowing what for— and that even that can be beautiful.

[chcrrycosmos]

It begins in the hush of leaf-shadow, where a pinprick of life clings to green, a speck of intention no larger than a wish. No one sees it. No one applauds. But life does not need to be seen to be real.

The egg is still. It waits without knowing how to wait. Time, the slow teacher, holds its hand and leads it into movement.

From stillness, hunger emerges— a mouth, a body, a need. The caterpillar is born to eat and so it eats. Leaves become its cradle, its kingdom, its undoing.

Each hour, it wears its own skin down. It grows by shedding, again and again, as if it knows that to become, one must outgrow.

The world teaches us to keep our form, but the caterpillar teaches us to molt— to slough off everything that no longer fits. Identity, shape, even safety. Gone, in pursuit of something larger.

And then— just as hunger has made it whole— it climbs some forgotten stem and surrenders.

Wrapped in silence, the chrysalis does not flinch. It dissolves. It does not ask what it will become. It becomes less in order to become more.

Inside, cells rearrange like prayers, a soft rebellion of design. Wings whisper their shape into being without needing light to guide them.

We call it stillness, but it is a storm. A quiet metamorphosis so total, the creature forgets it once crawled.

And when the casing splits, it does not explode forth. It climbs out slowly, uncertain, wet and waiting. Even wings need time to believe they are wings.

And then—flight.

The sky is no longer foreign. The wind, no longer enemy. What once devoured now dances.

The butterfly does not mourn its caterpillar self. It does not look back or wonder if crawling was a mistake. It simply flies, because that is what it was always meant to do. Even when it did not know it.

And we— we who grip our stories tight, who resist change like it is death— can learn to welcome the cocoon. To let go. To dissolve, without knowing what will rise from the softness we become.

Because to live fully is to accept every phase— egg, hunger, breaking, darkness, and yes— eventually, wings.

[chcrrycosmos]

It is not what I thought it would be. No tunnel. No light. No sudden flood of meaning to make sense of all the years. It is quieter than that. Stranger. Slower.

The last thing I see is a hand— not mine, but familiar. It trembles slightly in the air as if reaching for something it already touched too late. The skin is lined, the veins soft hills beneath the surface. A hand that once held joy and wreckage. A hand that loved without needing to know how.

It hovers there, then lowers. That’s all. Not dramatic. Just final.

The light around it is dim, the color of a curtain drawn too soon. Shadows are long now. They stretch into places where meaning used to be. I don’t strain to see more. There is no more to see.

And then— a sound.

Not music. Not a voice. Just the simplest thing: the wind moving through something hollow. A bottle. A lung. A corridor no one walks anymore.

It whistles without melody, but it is not cold. It is ancient. It is everywhere. It passes through me as if I’m not even here, and I realize: soon, I won’t be.

No pain. No fear. Just the wind carrying everything I was somewhere I cannot follow.

I do not try to hold on. There is nothing to hold. Only this sound and that hand lowering out of sight like a curtain falling on the last act of a play that never needed an audience.

And then— even the wind stops.

[chcrrycosmos]

There is a particular hour when the world is a held breath, and I am not asleep, but not entirely awake either— floating in the belly of the dark, adrift in the soft ache of a mind that doesn’t know how to close.

The room is quiet, but my thoughts are not. They come in waves— not crashing, but rising slow and thick like oil on water. What did I forget to say? What did I say too much of? Who did I disappoint with my silence, and who with my honesty?

It’s a gentle violence, this kind of thinking. A thousand soft punches I deliver to myself. Memory has no mercy at this hour. It drags up conversations that never mattered, then insists they mattered more than anything else.

The ceiling becomes a screen. I project futures on it, some that will never happen, others that might— if I were braver, if I were colder, if I were someone who could sleep through nights like this.

The sheets are a cage I arranged for myself. Too warm, too tangled, but I don’t move. Movement would be admitting I’m still here. Still not asleep. Still not forgetting whatever it is I haven’t done to be enough.

There are questions that only appear in the dark. Would I be loved, if I disappeared for a while? If I changed my name, would I also change my story? Is this restlessness a warning or a wish?

I listen. To the ticking. To the refrigerator humming like a monk in the next room. To the city outside, so sure of its own rhythm while mine stays erratic, skipping beats like a scratched record no one will flip.

And then— the worst sound of all: the morning starting. Not with drama, but with light. Soft, intrusive, like someone opening a door you thought was locked.

The alarm hasn't gone off, but the birds already have. The sky is bleeding its slow grey truth across the walls, and I am still here. Unrested. Unready.

I rise because the world expects it. Not because I am finished with the night. The ideas are still there. The questions haven’t been answered. The fatigue is heavy in my blood. But I walk toward the kitchen, toward the coffee, toward the hours that will pretend none of this happened.

[chcrrycosmos]

He walks past it every day. The guitar—leaning where sunlight once reached for its strings and pulled music from them like thread. Now the light is indifferent. So is he.

Once, his hands were calloused not from labor, but from love. Skin worn down by the friction of creation. By fretboards. By midnight improvisations and mornings that began in song. Now, they’re smooth again. Soft. Unmarked. Unremarkable.

The piano in the corner wears its silence like a funeral suit. All dressed up in dust and no place to go. Its keys, ivory and unforgiving, wait like teeth in a jaw that forgot how to sing. They have not been pressed in years, except by ghosts of intention.

He tells himself he’s too busy. There’s work. There’s rent. There are emails, all of them urgent and none of them true. There are errands that pile up like snow until you forget what the road looked like before it disappeared.

But there are nights when the quiet gets too loud. When his fingers ache in a way that has nothing to do with age. Something beneath the skin stirs— a rhythm, maybe, or a chord progression he never finished, still waiting in the back of his mind like a lost dog on a porch that doesn’t exist anymore.

Sometimes he dreams in notes. Not songs. Just fragments. A chord suspended in air, a melody half-formed, his voice at sixteen when he still believed sound could save him. He wakes up and doesn't write it down.

There are people who still ask, casually, like it's no heavier than small talk. “You still play?” And he smiles the kind of smile that knows too much. The kind that remembers stages and garage floors, open mics and string snaps, applause that hit him harder than any drug ever could. He smiles and says, “Not lately.”

He doesn’t tell them that he hears music everywhere. In elevators. In rainfall. In the way the city hums just before dawn. But he listens like a thief, like someone who’s been exiled from something he once built with his own hands.

The strings haven’t broken, but the silence has deepened. It knows him now. It fits him like a coat he can’t take off.

And still, the instruments wait. Not angry. Not mourning. Just patient. The guitar leans. The piano listens. The dust remembers.

[chcrrycosmos]

The sky is not quiet, though no birds sing. It speaks in color, in flame, in long unraveling sighs as the sun performs its slow, deliberate descent. Not hurried. Not reluctant. Just… final.

There is a gold you’ve never seen before. It leaks along the edge of clouds like molten memory. A red so deep it could be mistaken for truth, if truth had ever been kind enough to burn.

You are still. Not because you choose to be, but because the moment commands stillness. Even the wind holds its breath. Even the grass, normally restless, seems reverent.

The light touches your face like someone who once knew you well but no longer remembers your name. There is recognition in the warmth, but no promise of return.

Somewhere behind you, the world continues its impossible, ordinary tasks. A faucet drips. A clock counts. A moth flutters against glass. But none of it belongs here, not in this hour where time forgets how to move forward.

You wonder what waits once the last band of amber falls beneath the earth. Will there be darkness, thick and complete? Will it come gently, or will it swallow?

The sun slides lower. Not fighting. Not weeping. Just doing what it was always meant to do— end.

You try to memorize the shape of the horizon, the way it curves like the spine of something sleeping, or dying. You try to remember how to let go of light of color of knowing.

And then it happens. A moment so simple it could be mistaken for nothing at all. The sun slips beyond the edge, and suddenly you are standing in a world that no longer contains it.

There is no applause. No gasp. Only silence, like the closing of a book that will never be read again.