The Longest Hallway

Memory has a strange defiance. While my body decays, my recollections remain startlingly young, vivid, and alive. The ache of time touches me physically, but in my mind, every moment is still raw, still immediate.

The beginnings of pain were subtle at first, a tightening in my chest, a dull thrum in my bones. But pain grows, sneaks into the spaces you think are private. My bloodied fingertips—worn from years of carrying the sharpest words—still tremble with the echo of what was spoken to me, the slashes of cruelty I once thought I deserved.

I watched you fade away. The waters took you today, finally, and your slow death ended with no triumph, no victory. The war we waged silently—through insults, power plays, and emotional sieges—concluded. The phrase “the drying of a rose” haunted me afterward. My tears soaked the sand beneath my bruised feet. I had walked through storms of lust, solitude, and expectation, each step tempered by survival, my body steeled against what I could not yet understand.

My brain, however, remained raw. Images of you moving through the room replayed without consent. Your shouts, your insults, the silent screams I swallowed to survive, and even the flowers I would later lay on your grave—they all collided in a torrent I could not escape. Therapy was refused, both by you and, at times, by me. I self-isolated. I hid. I endured.

Your curse lingered. It was strong, unyielding, and patient. It watched me on cold nights, saw me refusing sustenance, hoarding money as though it could armor me from emotional collapse. It watched me approach burnout with white-knuckled determination, each finger a conduit of fire and ache. Pain stayed fresh, new wounds sticking to my heart like icicles in winter—frozen, sharp, inescapable. There was no power. Only survival.

We had hidden your sins, perfected an image that made the world think you were something you were not. But hiding is no absolution. The sins returned by night, creeping into my consciousness, forcing me to pray for a murky sunlight capable of melting them away.

Your grave sits still, a testament to mortality and distance. But memory is relentless. It births you anew each day, still fresh-faced, still present. I ask the echoes of your life to move, to give me space—but they cling. I cannot embrace fully, cannot allow myself warmth, for fear of inheriting the outlook, the bitterness, the darkness that you carried.

My body is a map of suffering, a ledger of the largest pains endured. Each scar tells a story: bloodied limbs, nights spent navigating ghosts, lessons learned too late, moments lost irretrievably. Yet those scars also illuminate a path. A series of flashing lights down the longest hallway, guiding me forward. Each light a marker of survival, each step a defiance of the past.

This hallway stretches endlessly in my mind. Its walls echo with what could have been, with whispers of love denied, trust shattered, and lessons learned at a cost too high. Yet within it, I discover resilience I had not recognized, the quiet power of endurance, the subtle strength of a body and mind still intact despite the onslaught.

Pain is a teacher, brutal but honest. It leaves marks that remind you where you have been and, occasionally, where you might go. In this hallway, I walk cautiously, refusing to repeat the past while acknowledging it. I collect the pieces of myself, bloodied but not broken, and place them carefully in the light of each new day.

The longest hallway is still ahead, but I have begun to walk it without fear. The shadows of memory will always accompany me, but they do not define me. I have learned that even a body wracked with suffering can find moments of grace, that even when every scar screams, the mind can carve out spaces of peace.

And perhaps, one day, I will stand at the end of this hallway and see sunlight, untainted by your influence, warming me fully. Until then, I walk, each step a testament to survival, each breath a quiet reclamation of life from the shadows of the past.