Unraveling Into Light

It is faint at first, like an incomplete idea, like the instant between inhaling and forgetting to exhale, and starts as a whisper—a ripple in a calm pond, a shadow bending at the borders of sight.

Because time is fading like old paint, falling in flakes, drifting, and dissolving into the empty spaces of the past where recollection echoes but never completely speaks, there is no then—only now.

Maybe I do not remember light.

Perhaps all I can recall is the sensation of warmth against my skin, a childhood afternoon, the hum of something far away, something living, and simultaneously something that is and is not me.

The body is really delicate.

A husk, a shell, a house I never really possessed.

Fingertips that held hands, traced words, caressed a thousand surfaces, and brushed against lips that used to whisper promises but now don't.

Hollow, brittle, and like twigs, bones are just waiting to be recovered.

Voices that I almost recognize fill the air.

I am slipping, unraveling, a thread torn from the fabric of what was, becoming less, becoming more, becoming. They call from the corners of everything.

Does fading feel like this?

Like slowly dissolving into something too big to define, too silent to contain, or too limitless to comprehend—not like falling, not like shattering?

In front of me, I see the past exposed, a painting smudged by shaking hands.

With faces moving like water, laughter glimmering in amber, and tears interwoven throughout, one moment blended into the next.

The insanity of it is that I am witnessing my own life—or what it meant to live—which never truly belonged to me.

The cosmos loaned me life, and I never signed the contract, yet I somehow accepted it.

The body can still recall everything, including the weight of limbs, the rhythm of heartbeats, the way lungs inflated like bellows, the pulse in my throat that sounded like a faraway drum, and the constant calling.

However, the body is now departing from me.

Or perhaps I am going to leave it.

It is difficult to distinguish between the two.

Then there was quiet, which is a presence rather than a lack of sound.

The gaps between what I believed to be me are filled with a hum.

My hands are no longer hands when I grab for anything.

My voice is merely a vibration, a ripple in the atmosphere, or a breath in the wind when I yell.

What is left of me?

Not the name they gave me, not the clothes I wore, not the things I spoke, and not the dread that weighed heavily on my chest.

I have no weight.

I have no limits.

I am—

Then nothing.

Then everything.