In the hollow breadth of an endless room,
where the walls ache beneath the weight of quiet,
I carry the burden of being—alone,
though not unaccompanied.
Seventy-one years rest upon his back,
a mountain carved by time and tales,
but its summit is barren.
His words, sharp-edged and heavy,
spill like stones in an avalanche,
crushing my fragile pleas beneath their clamor.
I ask for hands, for shoulders,
and receive instead the thunder of refusal.
Night comes,
and with it the ceaseless haunting—
dreams that press against my chest
like the palm of an unseen hand,
hot with fever and cold with despair.
I wake gasping in a body
betrayed by its own fragility,
illness weaving its tendrils through my flesh
like a vine choking the last light.
This is the shape of my loneliness:
not a shadow, but a weight.
A gravity that bends me inward,
pulls me tight against the hollow
where his presence should be a solace.
Time has made him still,
a monument unmoved by storms.
But I am the wind,
wailing against unyielding stone,
desperate to carve even the smallest fissure
where understanding might take root.
And yet, his silence is deafening,
his loudness a mask for absence.
I drift between these poles—
the crushing void of his apathy
and the sharp peaks of his defense.
If only I could turn this sickness into words,
etch my anguish onto the blank spaces
where he cannot see me.
But even my cries are swallowed whole,
lost in the endless echo of solitude
that blooms in the spaces he refuses to fill.
