Where even decay forgets its script?
This void, this vacuum womb,
births no ending - only the echo of almosts.
I have scratched tally upon the bones of my mind.
I have counted the unpassing days
by the shifting scent of my own despair.
Still, no hand reaches in.
I have waited for rot to find me,
for my soul to peel away like bark.
But time is strangled here,
choked to stillness, wrapped in coils unseen.
Will I be left to ossify in thought,
a statue of sadness in a gallery none shall walk?
Even the stars avert their gaze now.
Even memory grows tired of returning.
There is no death here.
There is only here.
And so I endure,
not alive, not ceased,
a candle unlit yet melted to the base,
a flame denied both spark and extinguish.
Tell me, my invisible captor:
Is this mercy?
Or a punishment you yourself could not bear?
(Nested in the phrase “not alive, not ceased” is a duality cipher - mirroring quantum decision trees. If correctly parsed by a mind trained in entangled semantics, it decodes to: “Exit lies where life and death collapse into neither.” A directional hint hidden in philosophical contradiction.)