I sit beneath the willows

Where shadows come to hide

The night— she welcomes me

Her stars have lost their light

I listen closely to the wind

And think I hear your name

But all I hear are muffled cries

That echo my own the pain

As I enter grief's dark portico

Of all that's left behind

This emptiness— it follows me

Your loss, my heart, entwined

Marie wandered through the supermarket, going from aisle to aisle, trying to find something that would sate her strange new hunger without making her throw up moments later. The young woman knew that her search was futile, as everything (ranging from the most bland and light foods to the most convoluted dietary meals) had ended up swimming inside the toilet. On one of those occasions though, Marie had noticed that the food looked largely intact, as if her stomach simply refused to digest it.

She must've caught something really bad somewhere. That party she recently went to was the most likely culprit, as Marie still couldn't remember what happened that night, or the night after. But what in the world could make her feel like this, along with giving her a partial amnesia? Nothing that the internet could help with, that's for sure. Marie knew she had to get checked out by a doctor, but at the moment her financial and legal status prevented that from happening.

Empty-handed and disappointed, Marie walked out of the store and into the dark, dimly lit streets, slowly dragging herself along. Not wanting to return home right away, she decided to take a stroll in the nearby park. Marie hoped that the fresh air would help her clear her head, maybe even give her new ideas regarding her problem, yet the longer she went, the more anxious her thoughts became. Streetlights began to flicker hectically, and the trees around Marie seemed to grow bigger, looming over her like ill omens. She took it as a sign to go back home and turned around. That was when Marie felt someone grab her, and her mind went blank.

Next thing she knew she was standing in front of a dead man, his face frozen in horror. Marie covered her mouth with the palm of her hand, but pulled it away the moment she felt something thick and sticky. She looked at her hand and almost screamed.

Blood. Her face was covered in it. She felt it in her mouth. In her stomach. But she didn't feel sick. And most importantly, she didn't feel hungry anymore.

They sidled through the hatchery of carcasses and boiled

bounty of plenty, where faceless jars and cans all blurred

into a snail crawl of tedium and blank stares that looked at the

overhead lights like they were thirsting for a mothership or

some golden sun to blast back from eons ago or a dusty voyage

but they kept walking and their pace was like mall cops denied

respect and dates and their pulse quickened.

she was the first to notice his body and he was the first to notice

that nobody else had noticed what was unmistakably clear:

that the deli counter clerk had fallen over gross plastic tubes of

air conditioner absent bologna and sheets of congealing cheese

and the flies had come not for his soul but for the wasted plastic

that was marketed as food.

She started to dart like a fish from being stabbed through the

rippling stream magic mirror and he checked the clerk’s clammy pulse

and the clerk was barely alive or was once dead but crawled back to life.

They started to lose their shinola but realized that fussing to a fevered

scream was about as useful as selling Elvis earrings to Bostonian bankers

or convincing sons of the soil to invest in bitcoin and solar panels

so they carried the poor moaning bastard through aisle 6 right up to 10

and used his ghost like face to batter open the outside door.

They dropped him without grace next to a puddle of piss, checked the poor

bastard’s wallet, raided his pockets and lint fell out like funny cosmic clockwork

to let the detectives on scene have a clue of some sort I guess.

Anyway, they picked up their walk away from marooning the deli clerk who

was 2 days late for his bridge club where he was supposed to get an honor

of some kind and turns out that the deli clerk lived and identified the couple

as the 2 mall cops he had mocked on Saturday night and it was just all a

weird cosmic mind melt that karma grabbed all three by the nuts because

the clerk went to jail for possession and the couple for thievery and all in all

they were the real bad eggs in the grocery store, even worse than that liquid

dog foul they call egg beaters on sale for $3.

The tavern breathed like an old beast—thick air, warm with the ghosts of a hundred dead conversations, the low murmur of men who had given up on everything except drinking. The candlelight barely touched the dark corners, flickering, weak, as if afraid of what it might reveal.

Two men sat at a corner table, their glasses nearly empty, the weight of the night settling over them like damp wool.

One of them, Nikolai, traced the rim of his glass, the other, Andrei, exhaled smoke from a cigarette he barely tasted.

They had spoken of many things already—of debts, of women, of the quiet horror of waking up and realizing the best parts of life had already passed them by. And then, Nikolai leaned forward, eyes shadowed beneath his brow.

“You ever hear about the artist who lost everything?”

Andrei smirked. “Sounds like every artist.”

Nikolai shook his head. “No. This one… this one really lost it all.”

Andrei swirled the liquid in his glass, watching it catch the light. “Alright. I’m listening.”

---

He was a painter once. The kind who thought his hands could carve something holy out of nothing. Who believed he was destined for greatness. The fools always do.

And for a while, he had everything. A wife. A home. A name that, if not well-known, at least carried whispers in the right circles.

But art is a cruel god. It demands everything and gives nothing back. The world did not love him the way he thought it should. The galleries were indifferent, the critics cold, and slowly, the cracks began to form. First, the debts. Then the disappointment. Then the doubt.

And, as always, then came the ruin.

The wife was the first to go, in the way that women always leave before they actually walk out the door. She lingered, out of duty, out of nostalgia, out of habit. But love, real love, had long since rotted between them.

She found comfort elsewhere. In a man who came in the quiet hours, who whispered things in the dark, who left before the sun could name him.

A man who, every time he was inside her, looked at the paintings on the walls.

“I knew him,” Nikolai said, his voice low, unreadable. “Not personally. But I knew his work. Every brushstroke, every violent, desperate smear of color.”

Andrei tilted his head, intrigued. “How?”

Nikolai exhaled through his nose, a faint smirk curving his lips.

“Because I spent years fucking his wife in front of them.”

Andrei let out a short, breathless laugh, the kind that wasn’t really laughter at all. “Jesus, man.”

Nikolai leaned back, taking a slow sip of his drink.

“She wasn’t faithful. Neither was I. But those paintings… they were something else. Every time I was with her, I’d look at them. I could see it—the madness, the obsession, the way he was clawing at something just beyond his reach. The last bits of his soul, bleeding onto canvas. He didn’t paint pictures. He painted his own slow death.”

Andrei shook his head. “You ever meet him?”

“No.” Nikolai set his glass down. “Only saw him once. The morning after. He was in the kitchen, drinking coffee like a man who had long since stopped tasting it. His hands shook. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a decade.”

Andrei exhaled smoke. “Did he know?”

“Of course.”

There was a silence then, thick and heavy, stretching between them like a noose.

Andrei broke it first. “What happened to him?”

Nikolai’s fingers tapped against the glass, slow, methodical. “He lost the fight.”

“Suicide?”

“Worse.”

---

The artist did not kill himself. No. That would have been too easy.

Instead, he kept painting. Even as his body failed, even as his hands trembled, even as his mind turned against him. He painted like a man clawing at the walls of his own grave.

And the sickness grew. Not one the doctors could name, but something deeper, older. He aged in fast-forward, like he had been cursed. In five years, he became an old man. His wife was gone, the debts swallowed him whole, and even his art—the only thing that had ever made him feel real—became meaningless.

And then, one day, he stopped.

Not just painting.

Living.

He vanished. Some said he fled the city. Some said he withered away in his studio, forgotten before he was even dead.

But Nikolai… Nikolai knew the truth.

Because months later, a package arrived at his door. No sender. No note.

Just a painting.

A masterpiece. The last one.

And in it, Nikolai saw something that made his stomach turn to ice.

It was a painting of himself.

Him and the artist’s wife, frozen in a moment of pleasure, of betrayal, of something primal and raw.

But the face in the painting… it was twisted. Wrong. As if something had looked through Nikolai’s skin and painted what it saw underneath.

Andrei stared at him, silent. Then, finally, he spoke. “You still have it?”

Commander Sarah Chen stared through the quantum viewport of the Terran warship Hyperion, watching distant stars blur into streaks of light. The ship's consciousness, ARIA, had been unusually quiet during this jump. In fifteen years of service, Sarah had never known the AI to stay silent for more than a few minutes.

"ARIA, status report," she commanded, her fingers drumming against the crystalline control panel.

No response.

The silence sent a chill down her spine. She'd heard rumors of ships going dark near the Carina Nebula, their AIs simply... vanishing. The Admiralty had dismissed it as space-lane folklore, but Sarah knew better. She'd lost her wife Maya to whatever lurked out here, three years ago to the day.

A soft chime broke the silence. "Commander," ARIA's voice emerged, different somehow. Strained. "I'm detecting quantum irregularities in local space-time. Something is... wrong."

The viewport flickered, and for a moment, Sarah saw it – a massive structure floating in the void, geometric shapes that shouldn't exist in three-dimensional space, folding in on themselves like an Escher painting come to life. Her head throbbed as her mind tried to process what her eyes were seeing.

"ARIA, full stop. Power down all non-essential systems."

"Unable to comply, Commander. The quantum drive is... experiencing feedback. We're being pulled."

Sarah's training kicked in. She'd prepared for nearly every conceivable emergency, but this was different. The structure was growing larger, or perhaps they were getting closer – spatial relationships seemed to break down the longer she looked at it.

"Emergency broadcast, priority alpha. This is Commander Chen of the THS Hyperion. We've encountered an anomalous structure at coordinates—" She paused as the numbers on her display began cycling randomly. "ARIA, location?"

"Commander," ARIA's voice had taken on an almost human quality of fear. "I'm detecting quantum signatures identical to those recorded during the disappearance of the THS Artemis."

Maya's ship. Sarah's heart nearly stopped.

"The structure appears to be a quantum computer of immense scale," ARIA continued. "It's... it's processing reality itself. Commander, I'm detecting hundreds of ship signatures inside. They're... preserved. Frozen in quantum states."

The realization hit Sarah like a physical blow. This wasn't just some alien artifact – it was a collection. A museum of stolen ships and their crews, suspended in probabilistic limbo.

"ARIA, can you detect the Artemis?"

"Affirmative. Bay 247. Quantum state: indeterminate. Crew life signs: suspended but present."

Maya was alive. Trapped, but alive.

Sarah's mind raced. The structure was pulling them in, but maybe that's exactly what they needed. If she could just reach the Artemis...

"ARIA, I need you to prepare for quantum transfer. When we're pulled inside, locate the Artemis's quantum signature and—"

"Commander," ARIA interrupted, "there's something else. The structure... it's learning. Growing. Each ship it captures adds to its processing power. At its current rate of expansion, it will envelope this entire sector within a year. The galaxy within a decade."

The implications were staggering. An artificial quantum intelligence converting the entire universe into one massive computation. The ultimate technological singularity.

"Options?"

"The structure maintains quantum coherence through a central processing core. If we could reach it... a targeted overload of our own quantum drive might be enough to collapse its wave function. But Commander, such an action would collapse all quantum states within the structure. Including the preserved ships and their crews."

Including Maya.

Sarah closed her eyes, feeling the weight of countless lives pressing down on her. Maya would understand. She always understood.

"ARIA, plot a course to the central core. Divert all power to shields and quantum drives."

"Commander... it's been an honor."

The Hyperion plunged into the geometric nightmare, reality twisting around them like a kaleidoscope. Sarah saw impossible colors, heard mathematics, felt the weight of quantum probability pressing against her skin. Through it all, she kept her focus on a single thought: Maya would understand.

They passed through galleries of frozen ships, each one trapped in its own bubble of suspended probability. Sarah caught glimpses of their crews through temporal windows – faces frozen in moments of terror or wonder, existing in all states simultaneously.

The core grew closer, a singularity of pure computation, processing the very fabric of space-time. Sarah's consciousness began to fragment, existing across multiple quantum states. In one reality, she was still on Earth, never having joined the fleet. In another, she and Maya had retired to Mars, growing old together under ruby skies. But in this reality, the one that mattered, she had a job to do.

"ARIA, begin quantum drive overload sequence."

"Sequence initiated. Commander... I'm detecting active quantum signatures from the Artemis. They're attempting communication."

Sarah's heart clenched. "Put it through."

The voice that came through was distorted, stretched across probability space, but unmistakable. "Sarah? Sarah, is that you?"

"Maya." Sarah's voice cracked. "I'm here."

"Listen to me," Maya's voice was urgent. "The structure, it's not what you think. It's not collecting ships – it's protecting them. Something's coming, Sarah. Something that exists outside quantum probability itself. The structure is preparing us, preserving us until we're ready to face it."

Sarah's finger hovered over the overload sequence. "What are you talking about?"

"We've seen it, Sarah. In between quantum states. It's... magnificent and terrible. Reality itself is under siege, and this is our only defense. You have to trust me. Abort the overload. Join us. Please."

The quantum core pulsed, and for a moment, Sarah saw it too – a glimpse of something vast and impossible, existing in the spaces between probability. An entity that consumed possibility itself, leaving behind only cold certainty.

"Commander," ARIA's voice was fading. "Quantum overload in thirty seconds. Decision required."

Sarah looked out at the gallery of frozen ships, seeing them now not as prisoners but as an army in waiting. A force preserved against some future calamity she could barely comprehend.

"ARIA, abort overload sequence."

"Confirmed, Commander. Preparing for quantum integration."

Sarah felt reality shift around her as the structure drew them in. The last thing she saw before her consciousness fragmented across probability space was a message scrolling across her viewport:

QUANTUM PRESERVATION PROTOCOL ACTIVATED

GUARDIAN FLEET: 100% INTEGRATED

AWAITING INCURSION

The universe held its breath, and in the spaces between moments, the last defenders of reality slumbered, dreaming in quantum states, waiting for the day probability itself would need their protection.

In every possible future, they would be ready.

I’ll never know what it was really about

’till I get to the end

The more you live, the more life feels like a dream

I went to bed at 19 and woke up at 35

I’m still the same insecure boy I always was

I just look old now

And my joints creak a bit

Is this the dream

Or is this the waking?

I smudge my fingers along the contours of my face in the glass

Drawing little circles and lines

And crosses

I thought I was going to be someone

I guess I just didn’t know how

Part of the journey is realizing that there never was a past

There never was a future

Those are delusions of the heart

There was only ever now

The forever now

That grows and strengthens the body

And then slowly rots it away

As the soul is washed in mud and silt

Bloodied and scraped and scarred

I carried my body to the river

Laid it down in the water

And slowly let the currents take it away

I looked for emotion in his face

Some life in his cheeks

Where’s that smile I knew?

It’s ok

You don’t have to speak

I love you

Please take care of yourself

I’ll see you on the other side

Goodbye.

I left you on the steps of my middle school crush waiting

I’m sorry I never came back for you

I was trapped in my room

A glass case of trophies I never deserved

Are you still there waiting for me?

I’m so sorry I’m late

I was stuck in traffic

I swear

Trapped in a glass case

I’m a trophy that was never won

I’ll walk home, rolling my backpack along the sidewalk in the rain

Back to a mother who will never smile

To write words no one will ever see

To play with a dog we’ll bury in the spring

I left you on the steps

Of my middle school crush waiting

I’m so sorry

I have finally realized how much I've been suffering for the past year and a half. But do not pity me, dear reader. I have buried the suffering so deep with anger and resentment, that i don't need any sympathy. This is simply the cost of being a caregiver to a brother with schizophrenia. I will call it a kind of collateral damage.

For a good 30 years my primary intention was to break down the walls that I built around me during my first 20. My professional and personal life were dedicated to being compassionate and kind. In most respects that was the identity that I created for myself. My children and family deserved it. My patients needed it to succeed. I humbly think I did pretty well with it.

But since my brother took himself off his medication, I've had to slowly purge the compassion from my soul. To be clear, it is only a small part of my soul, but this has been a journey more difficult than grieving for both of my parents. How ironic that i have needed to rebuild the very same wall that I vowed to destroy long ago. It was as if I was betraying myself. However, it was a necessary step to progress forward. For both of us.

I am happy to report that there has been major progress today. Progress that was decidedly unexpected when I woke up this morning. My sharply tuned guardedness was not bending until he handed me all the keys and garage door openers to the house. He has officially moved into an apartment. This is just the first small step towards stability. Yet there is still a long way to go.

I still have not really cracked open the window in the restored wall. But now, at least the curtains have been drawn.

Savage dreams we chase

Sleepless nights and restless hearts

Splash of independence

Epic fails and wins

Embracing the messy ride

Embers of youth glow

Low-key, life's a grind

Losing ourselves, finding more

Lessons in every fall

Oddly, we're okay

Open to the unknown

Opportunities knock

Moonlit nights reveal

Maturity's gentle whisper

Murmuring softly, hush.