Lifeless life

So this is all I will ever be?

[the-lifeless-life]

Thoughts, that turned into words, words that turned into actions, actions that turned into moments, moments that turned into memories, memories that were once just thoughts, turned into forgotten stories.

[the-lifeless-life]

the complicated pantomime of being alive.

[the-lifeless-life]

holding hand without calculating what it might cost.

[the-lifeless-life]

the lungs of someone who had drowned without anyone noticing.

[the-lifeless-life]

the microscopic remains of moments that should have died when the moment ended.

[the-lifeless-life]

The imagination playing tricks after midnight.

[the-lifeless-life]

The grave contains no corpse.

[the-lifeless-life]

the terrible stillness of portraits whose subjects have long since died.

[the-lifeless-life]

A name I can no longer remember without remembering the person I was when I first heard it.

[the-lifeless-life]

the grave has become too deep to remember what had first been lowered into it.

[the-lifeless-life]

the unguarded stillness of a soul that has not yet discovered the necessity of disguises.

[the-lifeless-life]

my buried days, or to search through the shrouds for the last untouched face of my innocence.

[the-lifeless-life]

(Pause.)

the world beyond is forever demanding, and i return here again and again, back to...

(hesitates)

..me.

[the-lifeless-life]

to rebuild endlessly from the debris of things that should never have been broken.

[the-lifeless-life]

to set a place on fire, the desperate wish to make the outside resemble the inside.

[the-lifeless-life]

to convince the body that illness is its natural climate.

[the-lifeless-life]

layer upon layer of unsurrendered thought settling at the bottom of the self, all the words that have waited so long to be spoken, they no longer remember how to become sound.