Fading Thoughts

The rain had fallen all the night long and a steady murmur was there that whispered against the cracked windowpane of Room 304. Morning arrived not with sunlight but with a bruised sky and shadows that clung like cobwebs to the corners of the peeling walls. Abu sat in pensive mood at the edge of a thin metal-framed bed, fingers idly tracing the furs of his sweater. The room smelled of mildew and dust—like forgotten dreams.

Outside; the world moved on. Cars hissed over wet asphalt. Children laughed, somewhere distant. But inside Abu, everything was still.

He stared at the coffee mug on the floor—empty, chipped, stained with rings of past mornings. It reminded him of something though he couldn’t say what. Maybe a conversation long gone. Maybe a memory blurred at the edges. Life, it seemed, was just a series of echoes.

There had been a time when Abu believed in something. He couldn’t recall exactly what—only that it had shimmered, once like sunlight through clean glass. Like laughter in a room full of friends. That feeling had long since faded, replaced by a dull weight in his chest and the persistent ache of going through the motions.

The walls of his room were lined with yellowed pages—scribbles, thoughts, pieces of poetry he no longer claimed as his. Some were taped, others pinned with rusting tacks. A gallery of a mind once vivid, now frayed and collapsing inward. His favorite was a line scrawled years ago: "I collect thoughts like old coins—rare, useless and vanished." He read it now with a kind of sad fondness.

There’s a strange emptiness that settles in when hope has quietly packed its bags and slipped away in the night. Abu didn’t cry anymore. He didn’t rage or plead. He merely existed, a ghost with skin, shuffling through a life that felt more like a waiting room than a journey.

He sometimes dreamt of escape. Not the kind of escape that came with passports or train tickets, but of some deeper kind. A fading into mist and a final sigh into the soil but even dreams felt heavy these days. And so, he remained—like a story paused mid-sentence, unsure if it deserved an ending.

There was a park nearby, and sometimes, when the world didn’t press too hard against his bones, Abu would wander there. On those rare mornings, the wind seemed to carry secrets through the trees, brushing past him like a forgotten friend. He'd watch pigeons crowd beneath a bench, scrapping for crumbs and wonder if they ever questioned the shape of their days.

People passed him by, always in motion—smiling into glowing screens, talking to voices he couldn’t see. To them, he was part of the scenery: the man with the far away eyes and the hunched shoulders, always sitting, always silent. He imagined himself as a sketch—pencil-thin, half-erased, barely clinging to the page.

There was no climax to his story, no sudden redemption or twist of fate. Just the slow erosion of meaning, like waves washing words from a stone. Yet in the quiet of his mind, there lingered one last truth: life was not cruel; it was indifferent. And perhaps that was the heaviest burden of all.

Back in his room, the rain had stopped. The sky remained gray, a dull shroud stretched tight over the city. Abu stood, legs trembling from stillness, and walked to the mirror.

He did not recognize the man staring back. Hollow cheeks, eyes ringed in sleep’s absence, face carved from tired marble. He touched the glass, half-expecting it to ripple.

A single word formed on his lips but went unspoken. It floated in the air between breath and silence—lost, like so much else.

And yet, he turned to the door. Not out of hope, not out of will, but because something in him still moved. A flicker, a remnant, a fading thought.

He stepped out into the hallway, where the flickering light buzzed overhead and the world outside still hummed in motion. The sound of distant laughter. The clatter of footsteps. Life continued, oblivious to the ache behind every smile.

Abu walked on, swallowed by the corridor’s long stretch of pale walls and forgotten echoes.

And somewhere, between memory and moment, the rain began again.