text: "Sorry" said Viv. "you're too late." Muted colours that dance in the shadows, the words reverberated in Edwin's mind. For what this time? "You're too late". A crack in the plate. The words hung in the air, sort of as if it was a lingering melancholic melody that pulled the strings of Edwin's heart. Words that seemed lost, whispering a lost dream, tantalizingly close yet ever so distant. Like a song you cherish, but the lyrics slip through the cracks of your memory. Leaving nothing but a faint resonance. Edwin thought, “something new?” Open doors. Once ajar. Now stood as sentinels of a reminder of what withered into the clouds, echoing with the weight of burdens only later will I feel he thought. The Autumn leaves next to the door on the floor, brittle and fragile. Untouched purities. Now surrender to the footsteps and crumble beneath my feet. The cold is never really lingering, and the warmth never really arrives.” A mirror of no reflection. The hampered birds, beneath unmarked leaves, sing harmonies. But eternality skips these lines in this tranquillity, tasteless strawberries. In this domain of no law, that voice sounds ever so familiar, yet distinct. Hums noiselessly in a world that’s neither fully dark nor bathed in light. Playing in a tuneless hum. For here, I am a traveller on a ferries wheel, a traveller submerged in an empty sea, a traveller no more. I tread lightly, leaving only footprints engulfed by the waves. Actions manifested and dissolve swiftly, emerge from the depths of slumber and gone within the blink of sharp-eyed observer. A silent witness of the shift in moment, as the days melt into the expanding records of history. In this labyrinth, the emerald grass, withered. Shades of grey are smeared across the exquisite blue skies. Lost melodies, sing the warmth of feeble rays in world full of butterflies but no flowers, bottles drift unwillingly in a boundless sea, where their messages were never written; The wheels on the ferries wheel spins on. The variegated wings of nature reduced to fragments of an elapsed dream. Yet among the relinquished realm, a pot sits above one singular campfire, heating for what seems to be a millennium, never boiling. Next to a tree with five apples that never fall. It a riddle without resolution, this malicious riddle that strips away the essence of identity. For I am dragged on by the nightmarish chasm where all that remained is unearthly jinxed by the ghost of annellation, a dimension of a single line of thought, feelings left, only to be swallowed into the hollow shell of the living. Here where the rules set by normalities are blurred. The feeling of nothing at all, tears are shed yet you don’t know why. Nothing wants to move forward or backwards, for the world is frozen only for me and I won't unfreeze for I cannot see myself. In this desolate landscape, where the boundaries between consciousness and oblivion blurred, the seeker found themselves caught in a perpetual nightmare of bareness, a relentless echo chamber of despair where nothingness had devoured every resemblance of meaning and sensation. It is a realm of an infinite void, where every thought, every emotion, had been swallowed by the all-consuming abyss, leaving behind a chilling blankness that haunts your very essence. Here, in this twilight zone of existence, you struggle against the darkest corners of your consciousness, navigating the faithless terrain of a reality wanting of hope. Placing your yearnings in something you no longer believe in, where the only certainty is the unyielding grip of the void. Your void. In these moments one would gasp for breath because it's suffocating here, but nothing seems to come in. Because the mirrors no longer reflect one’s identity, shattered, fractured into distorted stripes that no longer bore resemblance to the familiar self. The pages turn forward and turn back, revisited, recollected. Buried deep within us, plaguing our eyes like ghosts of what once was. Only knowing you before, its desperate. You blood flows without the scarlet river being drawn, a sensation of no pain, no pleasure. Trapped in a frozen world, unable to see or understand, bewildered by emotions that can't be felt. The days will bleed, each day bled into the next, unending cycle of this peculiar feeling. How can one stare at something over and over but forget the next day, for everyday? As you and I sit upon this ferries wheel lingering on till the butterflies submerge into this empty sea with no noise at all. It’s awfully quiet, it always is. Yet I could feel this labyrinth getting louder and louder. Like the walls of existence were awakening; I stumbled on those forgotten words. Words that carried the weight that I’ve lost. Split memories that vibrated with an endless and unsettling drumbeat that pounded relentlessly, persistently taunting me. Butterflies placed on my hands before altered into sand. The crack in the plate. Each grain was like a piece of life that could no longer be grasped. Slipping away leaving a momentarily bitter taste that seemed to last forever. Once blazing now decay, a realm where time holds naught at bay Here where the whispers are faint but ever so loud, never to sway. Wishing to go ahead but which path to seek Trapped in a sky where senses grow weak. Where your tossed and twirled, Past and future collapsed into a whirlpool. The melodies of the anguished followed by the symphonies in waiting, Never to be played forever hesitating. I scream not in terror, nor for I or you, But for I to finally hear, a voice long overdue. A scream to fill the hollow apple tree core No escape, no exit, hope to glean. In the abyss of what seems to be someone else's mind, I'm forever unseen. For a moment, just a moment you just decide to think of things, maybe it was the heavens that grant you this one second, a split second if you weren’t so far away you would notice. In this second, I thought. “Mother?” The traveller stops watching; something clicks, the ferries wheel stops. The strings stop playing, the crack in the plate opens; it breaks, all the smudges on the mirror erased. Edwin opens a door that seemingly was always there. The water for once starts to boil. It still is so quiet, yet something deafening could be heard, something was roaring, but it is noiseless. For once Edwin could hear something in this realm, a silence that screams. An apple has fallen.