Fog in my mouth, I taste the hall. Doors blink open, then forget me. A candle learns my name and suddenly it isn't mine. If I reach for "real" it turns to ash. If I look away it breathes. Barefoot in a soft unknowing, glass-light under velvet scenes. Familiar faces stitched and drifting, smiling like they've never been. No key, no center, only spirals, something watching through the seams. Cathedral water, stone-sky fever. I kneel to a silence with teeth. Voices brush my throat they promise, then unravel. The mirror gives me borrowed eyes. The answer won't hold still. Barefoot in a soft unknowing, glass-light under velvet scenes. Familiar faces stitched and drifting, smiling like they've never been. No key, no center, only spirals, something watching through the seams. I met my reflection in black rain, it grinned too gently to be kind. I touched the truth, my fingers passed, like smoke remembering a spine. Knowledge is a fevered mercy. It bites - then sings. Barefoot in a soft unknowing, glass-light under velvet scenes. Familiar faces stitched and drifting, smiling like they've never been. Hush, there's a latch in the sky. Hush, there's a crack in the "I". Pull, and the daylight spills out wrong soft as a choir, sharp as a thorn. Not cruel, not kind, just ancient and near, asking my heartbeat what it fears. I keep my questions under my tongue, like a small cold star that won't go out. If this is waking, let it blur, let the last light fold into doubt. And through the skin of the quiet the real thing listens without a mouth.
