It’s this damp, heavy thing inside, this stain I carry… my own, I always thought, my private little rot. But it pulls, it pulls outwards, doesn’t it? It feels the others. It wants to join the great, grey river, the sea of all the other stains. Oh, to let it go, to simply stop… stop being just this one, singular point of pain. Bring me there. Bring me to the chasm, the one I think I remember, just before the first light, the chasm of innocence. That’s where it must go. I would pour this miasma from my throat and watch it fall, a single dark drop merging, finally becoming one with the fate of all men.

Because we all have it. They just don’t see. They walk past the window, carrying it, pretending it’s just the weight of the groceries, the ache in the back. But it’s the cancers, isn’t it? The cancers of this world, the quiet, creeping dread in the bone. We have to bear it. We just… bear it. And why?

Because He won’t stop.

I can hear him. In the pause between br(d)eaths. A scratching, a whispering, behind the plaster of the sky. God, in his high room, his mind all gone. The walls are crumbling, I see the dust of it on the leaves, in my own cup of tea when i’m driving, and his insanities leak through. They are the cancers. They are the thoughts that are not my own. We are just the vessels for his decay, and we have to bear it all, all of it, until the walls fall completely… just allow me into the chasm… let me be done with me… let me be one with the rest…