Hollow Remnants

By [Brwa S Rasheed]

There are rooms I do not enter,
doors I welded shut with bone and sinew,
memories pressed between the walls like dried insects,
fragile, rotting, never quite dead.

The past does not sleep.
It moves beneath my skin,
a rhythm of hands that never let go,
voices that coil around my throat,
laughter that sounds like breaking glass.

I walk through mirrors and find someone else staring back,
eyes that don’t belong to me,
a mouth that speaks in riddles,
a face I’ve tried to carve away.
But the past grows back like ivy,
crawling, strangling, consuming.

There were nights that never ended,
silent wars fought in locked rooms,
secrets swallowed like shards of ice,
cold, cutting, sinking deep.

I have learned to live as a whisper,
to step lightly through the wreckage,
to fold myself into the smallest spaces,
as if disappearing could make me safe.

But echoes do not die.
They linger, they gnaw, they fester.
And in the quiet, when the world goes still,
they find their way back home.