Shadows are not empty;
they’re archives—
inked thumbprints of everything that stayed.
They draft the room’s low treaty:
stand with your back to the wall,
face the nearest exit,
learn the floorboards’ language.
I was pressed into the world like a seal in hot wax,
stamped before I had a name.
I carry the blunt sentence:
I exist without my consent.
Even so, the dark keeps teaching.
How to breathe like a held note.
How to stitch a torn night with quiet thread.
How to let rage pass through like weather
and leave the furniture standing.
Shadows don’t ask why;
they ask what now.
They hand me a pen made of midnight
and a page that is the next minute.
So I sign where I can:
this breath, this step, this stubborn pulse.
If I must be here, then hear me—
I will name the darkness mine
and make of it a doorway.