Built of Shadows and Spirals
I keep thinking about how many times in my life I whispered to the universe that I just wanted to be left alone. I said it so casually, tossed it out like a half-joke, as if solitude was this soft, sunlit retreat I could slip into whenever the world pressed too hard against my skin. I imagined peace looking like a quiet room, a closed door, a deep breath I didn’t have to fight for. But then it actually happened… people drifted, distances stretched thin, seasons shifted without waiting for me and suddenly I found myself exactly where I’d claimed I wanted to be: alone. Completely, dangerously alone. And the brutal truth is that I am terrible company for myself. I didn’t know that until the silence settled on my shoulders like wet wool, heavy and suffocating. No one tells you that when the world finally quiets, your mind grows teeth. No one warns you that silence can be carnivorous, that it can stalk you through your own rooms, circle you at night like something feral, tear into the softest parts of you the moment you stop pretending you’re fine. It’s astonishing how fast loneliness can become its own predator that doesn’t sit beside you, it feeds off you.
My thoughts don’t move in straight lines. They never have. I’ve never had the mercy of a narrative, no clean beginning or clear ending… just endless middles that loop back on themselves like they’re trying to prove a point I can’t decipher. Everything circles and coils, knotting tight like tangled jewelry I keep trying to unravel, only to realize the chain has twisted in on itself again. My mind doesn’t walk; it spirals. It descends. It drags me by the ankle into quicksand I didn’t see coming, ground that looks solid until the second it swallows me whole. It opens wormholes under my feet that swallow any sense of direction the moment I get close to something that resembles clarity. One second, I’m fine, breathing steady, doing something as mundane as washing dishes or driving down a familiar road, and the next I’m ten layers deep in a memory I never meant to revisit… a sentence someone said in 2014, a look I misinterpreted, a moment that still tastes like shame. I can go from perfectly present to trapped inside a place I don’t want to go in the time it takes my heartbeat to stutter. That’s the part no one sees… how easily the floor gives out beneath me. How quickly the familiar becomes the undertow and the present becomes a bottomless pit.
Sometimes the darkness in my mind doesn’t even feel metaphorical. It feels engineered, like someone designed the inside of my head with the same precision used to build prisons. There are corridors that twist back on themselves, staircases that lead straight into the floor, rooms with walls that seem to breathe when I’m not looking. Bar lined archways that open into pitch-black chambers where the air hangs thick with old sorrow. And on the worst nights, my own thoughts turn predatory. They stalk me, dragging their fingertips along the walls as if they’re tracing the outline of my undoing. They don’t rush… they don’t need to. They deliberately circle the edges of my awareness like they’re waiting for me to slip, for exhaustion to loosen my grip on myself, knowing eventually, inevitably, I’ll wander back in. There are moments when I can feel it… something in me settling into the corner of the room, watching with a patience that feels older than I am. It feels ancient, like something born long before me, something that has lived in my bloodline, my bones, my breath. It’s not loud. It doesn’t have to be. Its quiet is the kind that sinks teeth into your spine, the kind that makes the air feel thick and the shadows feel sentient. I’ve tried outrunning it, numbing it, burying it beneath noise and routine, but it always finds a way through the cracks. It knows the exact places where my mind caves inward, the exact seams where the light thins. And there are nights when its silence presses so hard against my chest that even breathing feels like a negotiation I’m not sure I can win. The haunting part isn’t the monster, it’s the dawning realization that the architecture that traps me wasn’t built around me… it was built from me.
Imagine being stuck inside that… no exit sign glowing red in the corner, no emergency hatch to kick open, no doorway leading anywhere quieter. Just you and the noise, even when the world outside is still enough to hear the hum of the refrigerator or the distant sound of someone else’s life happening. That’s my life on the inside. It’s a kind of exhaustion that doesn’t show up on my face but settles deep in my bones, an ache I don’t know how to name out loud without sounding unhinged. People assume I’m dramatic, or overthinking, or “too sensitive,” as if sensitivity is a flaw instead of a survival mechanism, the only reason I’ve survived this long. But they’ve never walked those dim corridors where thoughts chase their own shadows, where fear echoes until it sounds like a voice. They’ve never walked the dim corridors where thoughts loop back on themselves like they’re sprinting from a danger that doesn’t even have a name. They’ve never felt the echo of their own fears ricocheting off the walls, never had to negotiate with their own brain just to make it through a grocery trip or a phone call. They’ve never tried to hold a conversation while their brain screams or shivers or spirals like it’s preparing for impact. They have no idea how loud quiet really is. They don’t understand how terrifying it is when your mind refuses to give you a moment of peace, even when your whole body is begging for one.
Most days, I feel like a foreign language no one has taken the time to learn… beautiful in theory, useless in practice. I speak in feelings that don’t translate neatly, in metaphors that sound like riddles, in pauses that carry more weight than the sentences on either side. And most people don’t have the patience or curiosity to decipher any of me. They shrug at my complexity. They skim the surface before deciding I’m too complicated, and move on to something easier. But every once in a while, I remember that there are people… maybe only a handful in an entire lifetime… who can read the tangled loops without getting frustrated, who can step into the wormholes without losing their footing, who can sit with the chaos and not try to fix it or flee from it. People who stay, not because it’s effortless, but because something in my mess feels strangely familiar to their own, because something in my darkness mirrors something in theirs. And maybe that tiny, stubborn truth is enough to keep me going on the days when I’m bad company, even to myself. Enough to remind me that even broken languages can be understood by the right listener. Enough to believe that I’m not completely alone in the dark.
And maybe that’s the quiet, unsettling truth beneath all of this: I am built of shadows, spirals, and rooms with no doors, but somehow, I am still here. Still dragging myself through the same corridors that close in on me, still pushing through the static in my own skull, still clawing my way toward any scrap of light even when the dark feels like the only thing that truly recognizes me. Maybe survival isn’t heroic or poetic… maybe it’s just the gritty, unglamorous act of staying alive through nights that make your bones feel hollow, through mornings where even breathing feels like an obligation. And on the days when disappearing into myself feels easier than fighting my way out, when the edge calls to me with the promise of rest, maybe that small, fragile possibility of being seen, understood, and held, is the only thread keeping me tethered to this world at all.
