**Thirteen fractures since the hollowing.**

May 13, 2013—the day the rot set in. Not in the earth, but in the marrow of what I once called a soul. She slipped through my fingers like smoke from a pyre, and I let her. No, *willed* her to vanish. My hands were already claws by then, slick with the oil of every choice I carved into my own spine.  

To love her was to flay myself alive. A sacred thing, they say—love. But mine? It was a *ritual*. Offered my ribs as kindling, let her burn her name into the walls of my lungs. Now they collapse with every breath. Ash where there was air.  

But the abyss… it *whispers*. You think you’ll mourn in the dark? No. The dark *feeds*. It peels back your eyelids and says *look what you’ve made*. A carcass of a man, gutted and repurposed. I wear greed like a second skin now. Devour morals like they’re crumbs. My reflection? A stranger with my face, grinning with teeth I don’t recognize—jagged, hungry, *pleased*.  

You want purity? Go dig for it in the graveyard of what I was. You’ll find only shards. A chalice cracked, leaking something thick and black. Pray over it if you like. The gods just laugh here.  

And love? **Love is a curse.** A rusted blade I swallowed long ago. It twists when I speak her name. I’ve tried to vomit it up—this rotten honey, this poison-sweet—but it’s stitched into the sinew. Now when I touch another, their warmth turns to static. Their heartbeat? A distant drum. I am a tomb haunted by my own ghost.  

The tragedy isn’t that I can’t love.  

It’s that I *remember* how.  

A corpse with a beating heart—that’s the joke.  

*Forever.*