Softer..

Isolation is a cathedral built from the bones of every moment I couldn’t survive whole.
Its halls echo with the soft drag of memories that never learned to die properly.Tragedy didn’t just visit — it colonized me,
rearranged my insides like furniture in a house no one lives in anymore.Now numbness moves through me like a slow animal,
heavy-footed, patient,
leaving prints in places where feeling used to bloom.I’ve grown used to the way silence gnaws.
It doesn’t bite to kill —
it bites to remind me I’m still here,
still made of something that can be chewed.In the darker hours, the walls breathe.
They inhale my past, exhale shapes I don’t recognize —
silhouettes of who I might have been
if the world had been kinder,
or if I had been softer.Sometimes I hear the tragedies whisper,
not in words,
but in the grinding of gears behind my ribs,
a machinery built from grief
that keeps turning even when I sleep.And yet, in this strange quiet,
I find a brutal kind of peace —
the peace of a battlefield long after the smoke clears,
when the ground is still warm
and the sky refuses to look away.I sit in the ruins of myself
and feel the numbness settle like dust,
thick, inevitable,
a blanket woven from every moment I didn’t break
but didn’t heal either.Isolation doesn’t comfort me.
It crowns me —
a monarch of the empty,
ruling over a kingdom of quiet scars
that no longer bleed
but never learned to close.