The Shape Of The Hollow

There is a hollow inside me,

a quiet cavern that no voice reaches, no laughter stays, and no love lingers long enough to fill.

The hollow inside of me echoes with everything I’ve lost,

each step pounds against the silence reminding me that I am both a body moving and a void lingering,

a vessel that leaks even as it drinks.

I have tried to pour the world inside work, touch, beauty, faith

and still the void waits, patient as winter, unmoved by my desperate offerings.

Some days it swallows me whole.

I walk through crowds with a smile stitched to my skin while the emptiness chews quietly,

a hunger no one else can see.

And yet,

there are moments when the void becomes a space for light,

a lantern of silence where the smallest flame can live.

Hope is not the filling, it is the flicker that survives inside the hollow,

the soft refusal to be entirely consumed.

So I carry both

the ache that will never leave me, and the fragile glow that insists on staying,

teaching me that even emptiness can hold its own kind of miracle.