I no longer moved, frozen into the cushion like a body too empty to protest, too heavy to still exist other than horizontally — and yet, I was still breathing, barely, as if breath itself hesitated to stay.
My back molded to the shape of the cushion, but it wasn't comfort. It was a surrender. My limbs weren't tense, just absent. Even my skin seemed too heavy to be felt, as if shame had seeped into the flesh, rendering it numb, useless.
The song had fallen silent. Or maybe... maybe I had finally pushed it away, not by force, but by exhaustion, like one closes a door too slowly to be sure, like one extinguishes a voice that has haunted the inside too long.
Only my breath remained — dry, irregular, raspy like a confession one fails to formulate, a guilty breath, too loud to disappear, too human to still deserve to exist in this silence.
