A JOURNEY THROUGH THE SHADOWS

I think about death a lot—especially now, as I fade out of the day and stumble into myself again. Every sunrise feels less like a beginning and more like a quiet step closer to the end.

I sit in a half-broken camp chair, some old hand-me-down that’s probably carried stories as heavy as mine. It creaks beneath me like it remembers. Across the road, a few creatures of the night scatter, chasing whatever madness calls them next. I wonder if they still believe in something—if they still carry dreams the way I once did. Mine feel buried now… not gone, just too far down to reach.

Life… it’s a broken heart wrapped in a shadow.

The desert teaches you that. It strips you down slow—feeds you just enough hope to keep you walking, then leaves you emptier than before. Tomorrow always promises something better, but it never delivers. Sometimes I don’t even hope for better anymore… just that tomorrow doesn’t come at all.

Death doesn’t feel far.

It’s 7:25 a.m., and I feel like a vampire—alive at the wrong time, exposed where I don’t belong. Night is where I breathe. Darkness is where I exist without judgment. Out there, people pretend better than I ever could. They hide their fractures. I wear mine.

Another day passes, and I keep asking the same question: does anything ever change, or am I already at the end of it?

This life… it cuts from the inside out.

I sit here with the weight of everything I’ve done, everything I lost. The past doesn’t let go—it just echoes. And her… she should have had diamonds, a better life, anything but the wreckage I drug her into. She stayed as long as she could… and then she became just another casualty of my war.

What I’d give for one more day with her.

Instead, I feel like I’m hovering outside my own life—watching from above, looking down at something that should have been mine. A life I traded away piece by piece. Now all that’s left is the aftermath. Residual damage.

It’s 3:53 a.m., and my mind won’t stop. Thoughts crash in, loud and relentless, one replacing the next before I can even breathe. When does it stop? I don’t want to play this game anymore. I just want to take what’s left of me and go home.

But there is no home.

I lost that a long time ago.

Sometimes I imagine what it would feel like to belong again—to be one of the living, the functioning, the whole. I’d give anything… everything… just for one more chance.

Instead, I sit here—lost, hollow, afraid.

60 yrs old and wandering through a world I once stood on top of.

This is what a beautiful mess really looks like.

I’m tired. Sick of all of it.

But maybe… just maybe… if I sit with it long enough—if I gather what’s left of my thoughts—I can still stand up.

And try, one more time, to piece something back together.