There was a room without walls,
a hush-engine humming under my ribs—
soft static,
bone-colored.
Some nights it shimmered like mercy,
others it stitched shadows
behind my eyes.
They said the door was open,
but the air held its own lock.
A clear cage,
hand-me-down fear,
a geometry of almosts,
built from fingerprints
i never made.
Inside, a small echo—
something like a pulse,
something like a boy
with rain-soaked hands
and no one to dry them.
He whispered in a dialect
of cracked lullabies,
half-invented,
half-inherited.
When the world tilted,
i felt him fold into me,
a negative of my own silhouette.
He carried a quiet that rotted.
I carried a quiet that burned.
Neither of us knew
which one was supposed
to survive.
Then came the unmaking:
not loud,
not heroic,
but a slow bleed
of invisible wires
unhooking from skin.
A molting.
A soft riot.
A fracture that let light leak
instead of fear.
Now the cage is still there—
glass ghosts rarely leave—
but it’s hollow,
weightless,
a relic of transparent wars.
And the boy?
He walks with me now,
no longer trembling,
barefoot on the chrome dust
of the path ahead.
Not healed—
just unhidden.
Not saved—
just unbroken enough
to keep going.