The Hunger That Wears Our Shadows

Sparing none,

It spread far and wide,

Embracing its victims with a death's grip.

Not as frost,  

not as fury—  

but as a presence fluent in the language  

of human fracture.  

It moved with the slow certainty  

of something that has studied us  

longer than we have studied ourselves.

It spared none  

because it understood the soft architecture  

of our fears—  

the quiet corners where grief collects,  

the unlit rooms where memory  

still limps behind us.  

It slipped into those hollows  

like a truth we once buried  

but never killed.

It spread far and wide  

the way a shadow spreads:  

not by force,  

but by inevitability.  

A patient claiming  

of every place we believed was safe  

simply because we refused  

to examine it too closely.

Its grip was not merely death—  

death is a door.  

This was a philosophy,  

a slow rewriting of the living,  

a reminder that anything unguarded  

will be taken,  

and anything taken  

will be altered.

Some called it a creature.  

Some called it fate.  

But I think it was a mirror—  

a dark one—  

reflecting the parts of ourselves  

we abandoned in the name of survival.

And perhaps that is why it spread:  

because it knew  

we would not fight for the pieces  

we had already surrendered.

—𝕃ℝ 🖤