i keep going but i don’t know if it’s momentum or resignation
there are days where it feels like i’m walking through my life as a ghost of someone i don’t remember being. everything looks almost right. the same walls, the same routines, the same conversations but nothing feels connected. it’s like i’m pressing my face against the glass of my own existence, watching the version of me everyone else knows move around without me.
i don’t feel lost anymore. lost requires a destination.
this feels more like drifting. a slow, dull unraveling no one else can see.
there’s this strange quiet inside me. not peaceful, not gentle, just…vacant. like a room where the furniture’s been taken out but the outlines are still faintly there on the carpet. shadows of feelings instead of feelings themselves. i wake up and it’s like my body remembers the motions but the part that cared about any of it is off somewhere else, unreachable.
sometimes i try to recall who i used to be.
her laugh, her intensity, her certainty about things but it’s blurry, like trying to remember a dream long after waking up. and the more i reach for her, the more it feels like she wasn’t real in the first place.
a phase. a glitch. a moment that burned out faster than i was ready for.
people say things like “you’re growing,” or “you’re evolving” but i don’t feel like something becoming. i feel like something fading. getting thinner at the edges. less anchored. less here.
i try to be better, to care, to show up, but it all feels like acting. like muscle memory. i keep waiting for a day when something cuts through the static. joy, grief, clarity, anything with an edge but everything hits me soft now, like it’s been wrapped in cotton before it reaches me.
what scares me isn’t the darkness itself. it’s how familiar it’s becoming. how easy it is to slip into the version of me who feels nothing and expects nothing. how that version fits in a way i can’t decide is comfortable or just permanent.
maybe the best version of me didn’t disappear so much as dissolve. pieces thinning out until the shape remained but the substance didn’t.
maybe she’s somewhere else now? living a life i didn’t choose.
and maybe the version that’s left… this muted, drifting, half-here version is the one that stays. not broken. not dramatic, just…dim. the quiet after the echo. the outline after the color bleeds out.
i don’t know if that’s healing or just surviving.
and i don’t know if it even matters.
jacobvanloon
theartofmadeline
jbbartram-illu
tangentwithtanner
kaledo-art
andulkaphoto
