STUCK

STUCK

Not the kind that lifts when the light bulb finally finds its filament. Not the kind you can sleep away or think yourself free from by morning.

This is quicksand stuck. Slow. Quiet. Merciless. The kind that finds you in the middle of nowhere — no witness, no outstretched hand, just the sound of the world continuing without you.

Small creatures creep close, sniff the air around your sadness, then scatter. People do the same. They linger at the edges of your life, watch you go under, and disappear before you can ask them to stay.

No goodbye. Just the shape of where they stood.

I glance back and find a face I recognize — my own, cheering and cutting me down in the same breath. The same hands that built me were the ones that buried me. The same voice that said you can turned cold in the dark and whispered — but can you, really?

My heart is heavy the way old houses are heavy — full of rooms nobody enters anymore.

My shoulders hold what my mouth never could. Tension. Pressure. Silence shaped like screaming.

Another year. Same ground. Same soft earth beneath my feet —

and I wonder if I was always sinking, or if I only just looked down.

But I am still breathing. And sometimes that is the whole war — just staying in it one more day.

y.s