You don’t know what to do with yourself, where to put your hands, how to quiet the gnawing fear that won’t leave your chest.
And in the stillness, in the waiting, in the aching quiet, I realise: this is all there is.
No fate. No reason. Just us. Just this.

A breath caught, a thought unfinished, a quiet please, please, please, not now. The world feels too big and too small all at once. Everything stretches, warps, suffocates. You try to swallow around the fear, but it sits heavy in your throat, unmoving.
5/

Until suddenly, they won’t. Until something shifts, and the air feels thinner, and the ground isn’t steady anymore. And then all you can do is wait.

Every vibration of a phone, every sharp chime of a message, sends a pulse of burning hot, freezing cold fear through your body.
4/

A way to feel as though we can do something, when we can’t.

And we never really think about it. How much we take for granted. The people who move through our lives, the way things are, the idea that they will always be.
3/

People say they’ll pray for you, as if it could somehow soften the edges of something unbearable. But it doesn't. It never has.
Thoughts and prayers are not a tether, not a shield, not even warmth in the dark. They are just noise. Something to say when there is nothing else.
2/