Despair

Quiet as dusk settling.
It arrives quietly, never alone.
Slipping in, silent as breath held beneath water.
Carried in the hush before an answer.
In the hollow that lives between question and confession.
In the sigh that lingers, stretched thin across the years like old scars.
When our eyes turn from tomorrow and rest upon the ground,
studying the floor as if it remembers every future that never arrived.
Futures that ache beneath our feet, waiting in the quiet, never to be born.

No bells mark the moment it settles in.

Only the hush of empty chairs, waiting for footsteps that do not return.
Curtains drawn against the morning, holding back the sun’s gentle reach.
Gardens thirst quietly, roots curling deeper in the dark.
Roots wait for hands that have forgotten the old ritual of care.
Hands that no longer trust in the return of spring.

We inherit it as a quiet ache passed in the hush between words.
Not through breath, but through the ache that silence leaves behind.
Silence settling in the marrow, quiet and unhurried.

Daughters learn surrender from the gentle curve of mother’s spine.
A friend mistakes the certainty of another’s sorrow for wisdom,
and carries it quietly, like a relic kept close.
Each lesson another scar, quietly added to the collection.
Nothing changes. Nothing heals.

Despair by Piggie4299

Unicorn by Piggie4299

The illness waits, patient as hunger.
It settles behind the eyes, nesting quietly in the hollows of the skull.
Every sunrise arrives heavy, another weight to carry in the slow waking.
Food turns to ash on the tongue, flavor lost to memory.
Music forgets how to echo. Laughter becomes a language we have forgotten.

Even memory grows thin. Even memory turns away.
We forget the warmth of afternoons.
The forgiveness. The quiet kindness of strangers.

Instead, our minds become archivists of every wound.
Each disappointment preserved. Each sorrow quietly cataloged.
Joy left outside, stripped and weathering in the cold.
Joy dissolves into dust. Forgotten by the archivist within us.

The hardest part is the voice that despair wears.
It speaks with reason. It wears our own face.
It speaks in voices we know by heart.

It tells us the road ends here.
That healing was never ours.
That hope was a child’s gentle mistake.
And because it sounds so much like us, we believe.

Entire towns grow quiet. Windows darken. Songs vanish from the streets.
Children inherit maps with every horizon quietly erased.
They grow beneath a sky that has always felt heavy.

Yet somewhere beneath the ash of dreams left behind, hope survives.
Hope waits. Hope endures as seeds endure the quiet after wildfire.

Invisible. Patient. Refusing every obituary written for it.

Despair spreads. Quieter than fever. Quieter than fire.

But every epidemic depends on belief.

Belief that there will never be enough light.

The first candle has always quietly proved them wrong.