I wake up in my room as if after a fight—bare face, hands scraped, a dull siren in my head. On the windowsill a half-smoked cigarette burns, smoke turning the room into a church, and I am its only parishioner. I pray to what no longer exists: not to God, not to people—to fear, to emptiness, to the reason I still rise in the mornings. The prayer is short: thank you that I haven’t died yet today.
Outside, the city is cold, damp from the endless breath of engines and lungs. I walk the sidewalk, and the gray faces of passersby are like photographs of the dead. It feels like they all know something about me that I myself have forgotten. I want to scream, but in my throat there is only metal—dry and familiar. Inside, something breaks so often that now I can’t tell a crack from a doorway.
Love? It happens, but rarely—like a wound not treated with medicine, but rubbed again and again with sandpaper. Sometimes someone looks at me as if they see light in a window, and I almost believe warmth is possible. But it’s a lie in plain sight, a gift box filled with trash. They leave as quietly as they arrive, leaving behind the smell of a coat and someone else’s coffee. I erase their names so I don’t have to die twice.
I know there is no holiness left. All that was sacred has long been sold cheap, packed in plastic bags and hauled to the dump. Only daggers remain, and old prayer books with torn pages—I wipe my tears with them. I love this ritual: taking pain in my hands, trying to shelve it neatly, but it always refuses to lie straight. Pain is like water: it seeps, it flows, it wets the floors and makes me colder.
Sometimes at night I hear my phone vibrating—it’s not calls, it’s someone else’s life knocking at mine. I answer in whispers, as if afraid to wake my own truth. We talk about trifles: the weather, favorite shorts, how we don’t want to wash the dishes. But in every phrase something greater leaks through: the unwillingness to vanish forever. We agree to meet, and then each goes back into their own darkness, like into a small torture chamber.
I write poems no one reads, because words are like blood: spilled on paper they look beautiful, but smell bitter. I write because otherwise I start believing in purity, and purity is a crutch for those afraid to face their own conscience. I am not afraid of conscience. I am afraid of its absence.
Sometimes it feels like all this is preparation for something larger. As if the world is saving up a debt for me, and I am the bank meant to pay it back in screams. I try not to ask for mercy. Mercy to me is pocket change, like a crumb of bread in a beggar’s palm. I want something else: full, solid, final.
I meet people who whisper “nothing sacred” as if it’s a diagnosis. I like their eyes—honest, like blades. We laugh together, because otherwise crying feels shameful. We steal music from strangers’ headphones and dance in the shadows, as if it’s the last ball we were forced to attend without invitation. Our bodies know the truth words fear: we are imperfect, and that makes us beautiful.
And when night falls like a curtain, I lie down and count not sheep but mistakes. Each mistake is a small candle I blow out to see the darkness more clearly. I like that darkness is honest: it doesn’t promise light, doesn’t call to heaven. It simply is. And in that, perhaps, lies the only purity I am allowed.
