Untitled

deranged

[paper-wounds]

[sirarxen4]

Yes this time.

[skycaddy]

never expect life to remain steady.

It shifts like the weather—

three months you may live in warmth and laughter,

the next six in rain, frost, and trembling.

Stability is a myth;

we are only movement,

a road worn down by constant passage.

[skycaddy]

My little cat,

a pulse of trust, a spark of unbroken love,

thank you for filling the void

when no human soul dared stand beside me.

In those hollow hours,

your warmth pressed against the darkness,

and I believed in care again.

You taught me love without conditions,

a devotion purer than most hearts I have met.

Your small, fearless steps,

fluttering across the floor like sunlight on broken glass,

illuminate a path of hope

I thought had long since vanished.

When the world crushes me,

when despair claws at the corners of my mind,

you remain.

Every whisker, every purr,

folds around me like a fragile talisman,

a letter pressed between me and the earth.

I will not let go.

If I did, I would drift,

lost among distant stars,

where gravity has no mercy,

and you would not be there

to remind me of home.

You are hope incarnate,

the softest resistance to loneliness,

my unyielding, living promise

that love can exist

even when everything else collapses.

[skycaddy]

The Cry >

In the neighboring house

a sound rises—

thin, fractured, persistent.

We call it wind,

we call it nothing,

but it is a child’s voice

shredded nightly against the dark.

And we sip our coffee.

We lace our shoes.

We walk away.

The eye

We know what happens—

every glance reveals it.

But eyes are traitors,

mirrors that refuse silence.

So we train ourselves in avoidance:

look down at the pavement,

up at the clouds,

anywhere but into the human abyss

standing before us.

We build entire lives

out of deliberate blindness.

The Stones

Elsewhere,

a man is dragged across the square,

stoned for the tenderness of choosing

a love forbidden by someone else’s law.

We do not lift a stone—

but neither do we lift a hand.

We whisper: not ours, not our fight.

Yet every stone thrown

lands secretly in our palms.

The Courtyard

A woman fell today.

Her ribs struck the ground like brittle glass.

Her cry lingered,

long after the fists were gone.

And I—

I turned to the glow of a screen,

to the next distraction:

a film, a meme,

the simulation of joy.

The mask of humanity

so thin,

so easily torn.

The Knock

But silence is not infinite.

The knocking waits.

It always waits.

One evening,

it will come to our door—

relentless, patient,

carrying the same pain

we thought belonged to others.

We will taste it then:

the iron of fear,

the dust of grief.

And we will know

we have always been its host.

The World

Meanwhile, the world continues:

music louder,

glasses raised higher,

screens brighter.

The machinery of joy

does not pause for the broken.

We laugh, we dance,

we hashtag compassion.

And beneath it all,

the silence thickens—

a silence built on our own hands.

The Question

When the silence erupts,

when no one is left untouched,

we will ask—

trembling, desperate,

as though discovery were new:

How did we come to this?

And the answer will stand before us,

calm, merciless,

ordinary as dust.

By ignoring.

[skycaddy]

It’s all her fault

It’s all my mother’s fault, I tell myself,

she withheld the small miracle — love —

never taught me how to meet trouble without trembling,

never showed me what unselfish love looks like.

She folded me up like unfinished laundry

and handed me back to the world damp and cold.

It’s all my fault, too, because I was born;

I robbed her of the version of herself she wanted,

gave her a map with no route to the dream she’d sketched.

I am the inconvenient punctuation in her sentence,

the typo she couldn’t correct, the thing that altered everything

except her—except what she had already chosen to be.

And it’s my sister’s fault as well —

she hoarded the small warm places, the spoonfuls of affection,

scooped up the love that should have been mine by law of hunger.

She left no tiny patch of ground for me to hide on this planet,

no thin attic of kindness to shelter me from this premature winter.

She took the light and kept it like a secret.

So here I am, balancing blame like a plate of knives,

pointing them outward, inward, sideways —

a constellation of accusation where every star is sharp.

I wear culpability like an ill-fitting coat: too many pockets for apologies,

not enough fabric to keep out the cold truth.

Who will teach me to stop tallying faults like a ledger?

Who will show me how to be a home for my own small weather?

Until then I walk through rooms made of other people’s choices,

hands empty, waiting for a thing I was never shown how to ask for.

[skycaddy]

Why Them, Not Me

They are called forward,

as if the sky itself parts for their footsteps.

I stay behind,

watching the applause gather in other people’s hands.

I whisper to my shadow:

If you must follow me everywhere,

at least learn how to succeed.

But my shadow only sulks,

a dull echo of all the brilliance I wanted to be.

I climb, I reach, I beg with open palms—

each rung breaking,

each letter stamped Declined,

as though the universe keeps

a personal ledger of my failures.

And still—

I rise in the mornings,

pretending that persistence is holy,

pretending the future isn’t already sharpening its teeth.

What if it will always be like this?

What if I am destined to live

in the background of my own life,

the understudy no one calls to stage?

Tell me,

wouldn’t it be kinder

if hope simply stopped visiting?

[skycaddy]

Where the camera can’t reach,

I am a blurred frame through a window—

curtains half-open, sunlight tangled in my hair,

and music that feels like it only belongs to me.

The mirror returns my face, but

it’s always someone else—my mother, a distant relative,

every woman living inside me,

except my own.

[skycaddy]

We carved the forests down, and with every fallen tree we dimmed the voices that once whispered

between the branches.

We flooded the night with electric light, chasing away the shadows that used to hold our secrets.

The dark once sacred, once alive was pushed back, cornered, until it became something we fear instead of something we belong to.

The mystery unraveled thread by thread: fireflies replaced by neon signs, ritual silence drowned in endless noise.

We thought we were bringing safety, but perhaps we only exiled the magic that soft trembling in the air when the forest listened,

when the night itself was a living thing