Shackles

I feel myself sink into my bed, the mattress, a rotten carcass that envelopes me. The outline of my body rises up around me like immense walls that leak and soak me whole. I feel myself float in the residue of past lives lived and the light above me swims and dims into a sliver.

I am lonely. Lonelier than I've ever been in my life. How am I still breathing? How am I still sane? Why have I not decayed into this bed and become a dessicated corpse that floats in its own waste?

Why hasn't my heart sped up, crashed and entombed itself in stillness?

How much more can my mind take before it grinds to a screeching halt and ceases to humour existence and its infinite capacity for despair?

For how long would I still linger in this body, a shell, that has chained my consciousness to the shackles of time?