Solitude has many interesting side effects.

With bones hollowed by loneliness, my resolve grows frail, and I am pulled into the oblivion of self. The phantom ground shakes, the air stales, and suddenly all I can hear are voices, my own.

As I drift away, the world dissolves into thin layers of dusty-grey glass, sliding between each other like a simplistic kaleidoscope. The prismatic realm of shadow is not a safe place to linger, but I am transfixed. In maddening cycles the glass spirals, like ghost rose petals touched by life’s hallucination.

Sighs echo around the chamber as the fumes of thought escape my lips. There is no loving hand to pull me away, no distraction from the haunting grey fragments. Frosted windows reveal things unseen with company.

Behind them life dreams, life cries, life suffers.

It is upon these specter slates that my stories are written. My fingers pull trails of contemplation through the grime, like rivers winding through a dead earth.

I am not frightened until the shadow world transcends my eyelids, until I am trapped within the kaleidoscopic phantasm and choking on dust. All things can be dissolved by tears, mine and the sky’s, but I dread blurring the words on glass.