Where the Shadows Keep Our Identities

The Original One drifts in and out of lucidity; half-asleep, half-avoiding, finding temporary comfort in distraction, in satiation and soft silences, in anything that might still the fire singing like hot coals along the spine. She longs to quiet the inferno but cannot escape it entirely.

We run; through forests woven with trails that twist and tangle beneath the roots of ancient trees, roots that do not apologize for breaking the surface. We reach for branches like lifelines, dodging truths, pretending the ground beneath us isn’t rising.

She is an avalanche, trembling with her own weight, endlessly dancing to avoid the falling rubble of herself.

In the quiet gradients lingering beneath our eyes, reality reveals truths we aren’t ready to hear. They flank us in silence, companions cloaked in mystery, and sometimes we wonder; are we the shadows to them? Are we the phantoms pressing softly against their reality, haunting the edges of their perception? When the pressure finally breaks and the heart shreds into rawness, where does the aftermath go? Where do we scream when no one can hear? Into pillows? Into skies? Or do we bury it deeper, layering pain into places we’ve already forgotten?

But then… there are words. And we, creators of language, bleed through them.

We give shape to the anguish, let it echo on paper and in poems, in words only the soul understands.

The Brave One rises, tall in her silence, a warrior etched with the stories of our past. She walks barefoot across time, collecting fragments like glass, refusing to look away from the eyes of the dead or the faces we once feared.

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