A Room Without an Exit
It begins before I even realize I’ve lost control.
Or maybe it was already happening, and I was just too slow to notice.
I am standing outside myself, watching it happen.
The figure on the floor is me, but it isn’t.
It jerks and twitches like a marionette with severed strings, convulsing in movements I do not recognize as my own.
Fingers claw at nothing. Breath stutters. The body is mine, but it does not belong to me.
I should be able to stop it—should be able to reach in, slow the breath, still the shaking, take back control.
But I can’t.
I am here, watching.
And I am there, inside it.
Trapped.
This has never happened before. Not like this. Not fully.
A Body That Won’t Hold It
I watch myself shift, press against the floor like an animal trying to escape its own skin. The body writhes, twisting, searching for relief that does not exist. Hands flex. Nails scrape against the floor, seeking an edge, an anchor, anything.
My legs spasm—half-thought movements, no control, no direction.
It should be possible to stop.
It isn’t.
Every sensation is a knife against raw nerves. The flicker of lamplight, the texture of the air, the hum of the blood inside my head—it is all too much and not enough at the same time. I can feel my own thoughts splitting apart, unraveling into strands I can’t grasp.
I watch myself break.
I feel myself break.
The Thrashing of a Grown Man
It should not look like this.
I know this, even as I am living it.
A man is not supposed to move this way—wild, uncontrolled, thrashing against nothing.
A man is not supposed to fall apart like this.
But the body convulses, pushes against itself, a tantrum with no target, no direction, no restraint.
It looks wrong.
But inside it, nothing is wrong.
Inside, it is the only thing that makes sense.
Inside, there is no choice. Only the desperate need to release something too vast, too immense, to fit inside my ribs.
This has never happened before. Not like this.
The Glass That Won’t Break
I stagger forward—both as the watcher and the watched. The figure in the room scrambles, hands dragging against the ground, knees slamming into the cold surface. The walls stretch, distort. The window expands. The trees outside blur into something infinite, endless.
The body that is mine—
(Is it mine?)
—throws itself at the glass.
I know it won’t give.
It never does.
Forehead, hands, fists, shoulder—I throw everything against the glass. My fists, my shoulders, my breath. It does not give. It does not crack. It does not even acknowledge me. The rain on the other side falls in slow motion, uncaring, unchanging. I press my face against it, leaving a smear of warmth on the cold surface, my breath fogging up a tiny fraction of infinity.
I claw at it, teeth bared, hands frantic.
The figure in the glass does the same.
I am that figure.
I am not that figure.
The pressure spreads beneath my skin like hairline fractures in glass—too deep to repair, too small to shatter.
I want out.
The Ceiling Keeps Dropping
I feel it before I see it.
The ceiling is lower.
It is always lower.
The room tilts in impossible directions, folding inward, pressing against itself. I know it isn’t real, but I feel it. That is the difference. That is the trap. I can watch it happen, understand the illusion, but I am still inside it.
It is not a metaphor. It is not a trick of the mind.
It is happening.
The Need to Shatter
I watch myself fail to escape.
I watch myself break against an unyielding space.
It has always been like this.
The body on the floor should be able to stop. I should be able to step in, to pull myself up, to force myself to breathe in a way that makes sense. But there is no bridge between these two versions of me. The part that watches and the part that suffers are separate, forever out of sync.
The breath inside me is ragged, uneven. Every inhale feels like it’s fighting to be let in. I try to hold onto something—anything—but my fingers slip against sweat and air. There’s a distant sound, a low hum pressing against the walls, but it isn’t coming from outside. It’s inside my skull. A pressure that grows, a static buzz that blankets everything.
I am an observer in my own mind, a bystander to my own destruction.
Inside the body, I am drowning.
The air is thick, pressing against my throat. Each breath feels like it has to be carved out of something dense, something unwilling. Sound bends—stretching in slow, syrupy echoes that warp in and out of recognition. My pulse pounds in my ears like a distant, closing storm.
Outside the body, I am helpless.
I do not know which is worse.
The End of Movement
It does not stop all at once.
It slows in pieces. In fractures. In stuttering, broken increments of time.
My arms weaken. My hands unclench. My breath returns, but it is not mine.
The weight inside me settles like cooling ash.
Not gone.
Just waiting.
I am on the floor.
I am watching from the shadows.
I am inside and outside, real and unreal.
And of course, the glass is still unbroken.
The fracture seals, but the watching never does.
The part of me that lived it knew only the unbearable immediacy, the tidal wave that had no shore. But the part of me that watched? That part remains, frozen in time, cataloging every moment, every movement, every failure to stop what had already happened.
I exist in both places.
The observer and the subject.
The body and the mind.
The one trapped inside.
And the one who stands just outside the glass, watching.