The Hour Between Breaths

At night, the silence

sharpens like glass,

and the ceiling hangs too close,

pressing down with

the weight of what I can’t name

only feel in the hollowness

I lie still, but inside, everything trembles.

Thoughts pace like ghosts

down locked corridors,

whispering how easy

it might be to just stop…

breathing.

My chest is a cavern,

echoing with absence

not grief, not rage, just emptiness.

A suffocating kind of nothing

that wraps around my ribs

like ivy with no flowers.

I clutch the sheets

like they might hold me together,

but I am already in pieces

shards of someone

who once laughed without faking it.

There is no scream, no sob, no sound

just the soft, invisible collapse of a soul

Do others feel this?

the quiet panic, the fear not of dying,

but of never feeling whole enough to live.

The hour between breaths may feel endless

but it’s not.

Even in the silence, you are still here.

And that is not nothing.