Drowning

Drowning

I watch him drown in wood and paper, a slow suffocation I am forced to contain. He plugs my corners with cardboard and laces my skirtings with copper veins begging me to hold the noise he cannot generate. I let joists groan under the weight of terror. I let unread novels accumulate like dust with an army of paper soldiers stationed to keep my silence from bleeding through walls. He calls it curation but he only builds a dam against the quiet.

I am patient. I know the quiet always demands its share.

I offer no place to hide. I stretch a flat expanse asking for nothing, a loud disguise forcing his gaze from the physical into the hollows of the room. His mind drifts so I pull shadows long and deep against cabinets creating a void where objects can no longer shield him. For the first time my walls do not hide the world. He stands in my silence looking through nothingness to finally feel the weight of his own bones.