The Thin Line Between
A poem
I wake up to the weight of the world pressing against my chest, as if gravity itself has decided to settle its score with me. My body feels like a house abandoned to dust — its windows clouded, its hinges rusting, every movement an echo of what it used to be. I push off the sheets, they cling, desperate, and I wonder if this day will be any different from the last. It’s the kind of thought that sits heavily in the brain, sticky and hard to dislodge, but I try. I reach for the notebook on my bedside table, as though the words I haven’t yet written might hold the secret to pulling the weight off my chest.
Writing is a form of survival, you see. Each sentence a breath taken when the air is thin. I sketch myself in words because my reflection in the mirror no longer tells me who I am. I pen myself into being, building from fragments, from the brittle bones of experience that don’t quite fit together but somehow, if you squint, look like a life.
The pen scratches across the page — an old habit, a comfort. The ink smudges beneath my hand, a dark streak where my skin meets the paper. It feels real, this ink, this stain. More real than anything else in this room. More real than the walls, which seem too close, as though they’ve shifted in during the night, creeping toward me in their quiet malevolence. And I wonder when everything started to feel like it was shrinking. The ceilings lower, the spaces between my breaths tighter. Did the world begin to contract, or did I?
It’s in these mornings when the line between what is real and what is not grows thin. I find myself drifting, caught between worlds — one where the dishes in the sink are evidence of neglect, and another where they’re simply background noise to my unraveling mind. The smell of stale coffee rises from the mug beside me, cold as a winter morning, and I can almost taste the bitterness lingering at the edge of my tongue, a reminder of all the things I’ve swallowed down and never quite managed to forget. It’s all mundane, isn’t it? The weight of living, the everydayness of it all. And yet it crushes.
In the kitchen, the linoleum floor feels strange beneath my bare feet, as though I’m stepping on the skin of something alive. I glance at the refrigerator, its hum a steady drone, and imagine for a second that it’s trying to communicate with me in a language I can almost understand, but not quite. Perhaps it’s saying the things I refuse to hear, the things buried deep beneath the surface, the things I write around but never quite touch. Perhaps it’s mocking me, this appliance that never falters, unlike me.
I open the fridge, the cold air hitting my face, stark, sterile. It’s nearly empty, just the usual sparse fare: a half-empty carton of milk, a bruised apple, something unidentifiable in a Tupperware container at the back. I close it again, the door swinging shut with the finality of something lost. The hunger that gnaws at my stomach isn’t for food. It’s for something else, something I can’t quite name. I’m always starving for more than what this life offers, always reaching for something just beyond my grasp.
I sit at the table, staring at the blank page, the lines on the paper waiting for me to give them meaning. My mind races but stalls at the same time. How do you capture reality when it slips through your fingers like sand? How do you write truth when you’re not even sure what’s true anymore? My hand hesitates above the page, the pen trembling in my grasp, as though it knows more than I do about the futility of this act.
I remember my mother’s voice telling me as a child to stop daydreaming, to plant my feet firmly on the ground. But even then, the ground never felt stable. It always shifted beneath me, a reminder that nothing is as solid as it seems. Literary realism. That’s what they call it, isn’t it? But how do you write realism when the lines of your world are blurred, when the boundaries of what’s real and what isn’t are always shifting? How do you write about the truth when the truth is that sometimes, reality is just too sharp, too cruel, and the only way to survive is to soften the edges with a bit of fantasy?
The paper stays blank, mocking me with its purity, its untouched perfection. And here I am, soiled by the weight of existence, unable to match its stark simplicity. I want to tear it, crumple it, rip it apart the way life sometimes rips through me. But I don’t. Instead, I pick up the pen again and press the tip to the paper, hard. I write a single word. Then another. Then another.
I write about the day I spilled coffee on the floor and watched it spread like a dark stain across the linoleum, watching as it seeped into the cracks, as though it were alive, too. I write about the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, convinced that the world outside has disappeared and left me floating in the void. I write about the moments that don’t matter and the ones that do, about the sound of the rain against the window, about the way my breath catches sometimes in my chest, like a bird trapped in a cage.
The words flow now, thick and heavy, as though they’ve been waiting for this moment to spill out, to break free. Each sentence feels like a release, a breath I didn’t know I was holding. The ink stains my fingers, and I don’t bother wiping it away. It feels right, this mess, this mark. It feels like me.
And when I’m done, I look down at the page, at the words that have poured out of me, and I feel — what? Relief? No, not quite. There’s no relief in this, only the knowing that I’ve captured something, a fragment of this tangled life, this knot of thoughts and emotions and fears. And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.
I close the notebook, the weight of it heavier now, full of things I’m not sure I can face. But they’re there, on the page, staring back at me, daring me to call them real.
The fridge hums louder now, a reminder that life, no matter how surreal it seems, marches on. The thin line between what is and what isn’t blurs again, but today, I hold my ground.
Tomorrow, I might not.
