Light tore through the wide window in Ken’s room.
Sleep had abandoned him again.
He was living alone now — in the ruins of what had once been a home, a crumbling temple of memory and rot.
He woke disoriented, limbs heavy with the weight of silence, and stumbled toward the bathroom.
In the mirror, he caught a glimpse of something unfamiliar.
Half-man, half-myth.
Time had long since dissolved.
The hours no longer obeyed the clock.
Days passed without names.
But he was alive.
He was there.
Time warped.
Some moments stretched like wet cloth hung in the wind.
Others collapsed into themselves, vanishing before he could catch them.
He was becoming something else —
half-beast,
half-forgotten god.
The man in the mirror no longer looked like him.
Or perhaps he finally did.
He felt the burden of a thousand unnamed lives.
He felt the terrifying sprawl of the universe —
and his own quiet place within it.
Vast.
Small.
Holy.
His muscles unknotted.
His breath slowed.
He fell asleep on the chipped balcony, staring into nothing,
and feeling everything.
In the haze of smoke,
he saw through the fog of himself.
Unburdened.
He took a final hit from the divine.
And returned to the ritual of solitude.
Weeks later, over a quiet lunch,
he listened to the silence like it was a sermon.
Leaned in.
Tried to decipher it.
But the silence gave no answers.
Only its vast, echoless hum.
Leave a Reply