reading room
Forgetting the Shape of Me
Feeling the feelings of others for so long that I am forgetting which are mine,
standing in a narrow hallway, air tasting of damp wood and old metal, fingertips resting on a cold brass hinge that does not open but remembers opening, pipes muttering behind the walls.
holding my hunger to the light, tilting it, watching sediment gather at the bottom of the glass, not falling, settling, as if even motion has begun to doubt itself,
signals rising without language, static crossing under my skin like wires fitted to too many blueprints, each drawn by a careful hand that never learned the cost of care.
watching a choice split, and split again, not into spectacle but into hardline fractures creeping silently across a tiled floor, geometry my body cannot pronounce,
as though awareness itself were a kind of wrong gravity.
standing in front of a sentence that should be harmless, feeling it swell behind my teeth, warm and misaligned, like pressure building in a pipe whose gauge knows too much to be useful.
light loosening its grip on the wall, dust rearranging itself mid-air, my mind indexing every shift— noting, sorting, over-calibrating each tremor until movement feels reckless, measuring the breath of the room like knowing too much to touch anything cleanly, Aware of too many invisible ways to be wrong.
This should be simple.
My mouth tastes wrong.
weighing syllables in my palm like bent instruments, warped by a tuning fork that can hear too far, all vibrations at once, all slightly out of mercy, no single tone safe enough to trust.
Hovering between two switches — truth / tenderness — thumb shaking, hand becoming a stuck valve, open, closed, open, leaking nothing while pressure hums behind my ribs like an unanswered theorem.
letting "I should just say it" go stale inside my mouth, spit thickening under my tongue, rust blooming quietly along the back of my throat, while my heartbeat flickers between meanings I understand too well to follow blindly.
And doing nothing.
I am scared of making the wrong thing real.
Standing still while the room grows louder, not in sound but in structure, pipes expanding, floorboards tightening, lights sharpening along corners like systems I can see through but cannot unlearn.
I don't know what I feel.
cradling thin versions of myself on narrow, leaning shelves, labels written by hands that thought they were kind, edges tilted by arguments I cannot disprove, some tipping toward hunger, some toward silence, rebalancing weight I never chose but now cannot set down.
Lifting one. Setting it back.
thirst arriving like a question that has too many honest answers, time pooling at my feet like water circling a blocked drain, still, reflective, unmoving because it sees too much of the room.
pressing my tongue to the dark of my own mouth, pressing my hands to storms I do not own, feelings other people's weather strike my skin without warning — too bright, too loud, too close, as if empathy were a field with no shelter.
stagnating in a bent length of pipe, green film growing slowly inside, water forgetting which direction means relief.
While somewhere under pavement, beneath stone, a current keeps moving without permission, without analysis, without apology.
And still— breathing, standing over a hairline crack in the floorboards, feeling the feelings of others for so long that I am forgetting which are mine, feeling pressure gather without language, frameworks bending under bone, until even water, quietly, inevitably, finds a seam.
— Lilith