The smoke which spoke

Light tore through the wide window in Ken’s room.
Sleep had abandoned him yet 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.
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 condense them.

He was becoming something else
half-man,
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 magnitude of the universe
and his own small, quiet place within it.
Vast.
Small.
Holy.

His muscles unknotted.
His breath slowed.
He fell asleep on the balcony, staring into nothingness,
and yet feeling everything intensely.

In the haze of smoke,
he saw through the fog of himself.
feeling unburdened at the sight of it.

He took a final hit from the divine.
And returned to his ritual of solitude.

Weeks later, over a quiet lunch,when the haze of weed was behind him
he listened to the silence like it was a sermon.
he leaned in.
Tried to decipher it.

But the silence gave him no answers.
Only its vast, echoless hum.