***

I am alone,
and yet I am not.
A presence lingers around me.
It warps the walls,
twists the silence,
and fractures the shape that is me.

There is a pulse -
soft, uneven,
beating from within or without.
Time is folding inward,
collapsing sideways,
shadows move toward what’s not,
or what is.

Walls press together,
and I am nothing
but the tremor between them,
held by the force that contains it.

The room exhales. I pause.
I curl into myself.
I breathe. The air trembles,
inside the hollow of my chest,
the hollow of the walls,
the hollow of the infinite.

I am here,
and it is here.
Between us is nothing,
and everything -
a trembling that will not stop
until I dissolve into air
or the air dissolves into us.