I laughed until something shifted—
not outside me, but in the scaffolding of thought itself.
The sound didn’t echo. It waited.

Then it answered back.

Not in words, but in sensation:
a metallic taste,
a pressure behind the eyes,
the feeling of almost remembering something
that never happened.

The world bent slightly.

Shadows moved like old film reels,
flickering with images I couldn’t place—
a child with no face holding a balloon shaped like absence,
a door that only opens inward,
a mirror that forgets you when you leave the room.

I followed it.

Into the hush between thoughts,
the place where dream residue dries on the mind’s floorboards.
Time thinned.
My body became suggestion.
I felt myself replaced by echoes.

And then:
a voice, familiar, but misaligned.
It didn’t speak—
it occurred.

"You are not you," it said,
"until the forgetting completes."

I bent inward,
saw myself flicker like a failed memory.
Too many eyes.
Each one watching the others for signs of escape.

I cried.
Not for sorrow,
but because it was the only language left.
The tears felt like glue—
not wet, but final.
They pinned me to a version of myself I never wanted to revisit.

A room unfolded around me:
walls lined with photographs of moments I almost lived.
Every frame hummed quietly.
A verdict forming in the static.

I sat.

A chair without legs.
A throne made of implications.
I opened my mouth to speak,
but the words rearranged mid-breath—
letters sliding across my tongue like insects
with nowhere to land.

I wanted to run.

But the floor was memory,
and memory has no edges.
The ceiling pulsed—
an old heartbeat. Not mine.
Not anyone’s.

Now I drift.
Between thought and recall.
Between self and self-recognition.
Each night I sleep beneath layers of my own discarded decisions.
Each morning I wake up slightly misaligned.

Now I am the silence that answers your questions
before you ask them.

Now I am the space between.