Writers Jam

i am not entirely certain if I was ever meant to be a person or merely a hallway for other people’s footsteps they enter without knocking, their conversations brushing against my ribs like moth wings leaving behind the fine dust of their forgotten intentions.l sometimes I hear them laughing in a room I cannot open, and I wonder if I am simply a building that was never given a front door the air in my chest smells of mildew as though my lungs are storing old rainwater someone has draped their coat over my spine without asking if the weight was welcome the buttons press into me like tiny accusations it is not cruelty only the indifference of someone who believes walls and people do not feel the same kind of cold outside, the streets wheeze dust into my mouth. there is no clean breath left, only the granular taste of things long dead every clock I pass stutters, spitting out fractured minutes one tells me it is 3:09, another insists on 8:46, and a third refuses to tick at all as if time itself is sulking in a dark corner too ashamed to move forward i begin to suspect that time is not a river but a sequence of wounds we keep pressing with the same curious cruelty children have for loose teeth it is the pain, not the healing that convinces us we are still alive i write letters to no one in particular sometimes I address them to “The Person Who Might Have Loved Me,” other times to “Whoever Lives in the Apartment of My Former Self.” i sign them with names I will never own names that taste like other languages, names that would not flinch under a stranger’s mouth the wind slaps open the window without apology sending the pages scattering like pigeons that have learned too much about hunger to ever trust the open sky they lift into the air, not flying, only fleeing. at night, I imagine a sky without an exit no horizon to crawl towards, no polite ending where light fades into dusk the sun there burns quietly, not in fire, but in a slow, exhausted sigh it rises without conviction as though it has forgotten why it bothers to return at all. perhaps there, in that sealed and airless sky, i would finally be able to sleep without dreams. and if I did dream maybe my hands would forget the heaviness of everything they could not hold: the voice I never answered the face that vanished into another crowd the warmth I kept too long in my pockets until it cooled into something even winter would not touch.