This Living Grave

Content Warning: Contains claustrophobic imagery, intense psychological distress, and unsettling bodily descriptions.

This skin I wear… it clings to me. A wretched thing. It scowls, yet tightens its grip- like a blanket left to mildew in the rain, steeped in stains no water could lift. I catch my reflection as I pass the stacked shops. My eyes gape like gutted windows, carcasses of themselves- frames where something used to look back. Not human exactly, but something with a sliver of pride, a flicker of warmth. Something I can’t seem to find now.

Walking feels heavier- my feet aren’t just bricks, they’re dead weight, swollen and uncooperative, slamming against the pavement like they’re trying to burrow into it. As if they were forced to walk this path. As if they are burdened with the shame.

The cold gnaws at my cheeks, every gust slicing deeper, peeling me down to whatever’s left underneath. People slip past me, gliding like they’re made of lighter stuff, wrapped in their rose‑tinted ease, smiling as if the world is soft for them. And I’m here. Dragging myself forward, lungs burning with air scraped clean of warmth, bones rattling under the weight of a body that suddenly feels burdensome to belong to me.

Each turn feels like I’m dragging a piece of the night with me, something that latched on when I wasn’t looking.

I wake in the night choking on my own breath. My skin cinched tight around me like it’s trying to strangle whatever’s left inside. It feels vengeful. A simmering anger in its breath- a second body whispering what I’m trying not to remember. I claw at my arms just to feel space, but the skin won’t give. It clings harder, sealing me in.

I stumble to the bathroom, half‑blind with panic, and wrench the shower on. The water hits my hand like cold oil on a heated pan. I scrub them until the heat from the friction burns, until the skin screams for mercy. But I don’t stop. I can’t. Not until the rawness means something has been lifted.

I tell myself it’s the dryness. Not the memory. Just dryness. Just skin.

But as I drag the towel over my arms, it feels like I’m wrapping myself back into a grave. My own body a tomb I can’t crawl out of. Every inch of me stiff and suffocating. Embalmed in something I can’t wash off. I stare at my hands- trembling, raw, an angry red. Just over‑scrubbed, I tell myself. Just over‑scrubbed. Tools, nothing more. Implements. Artifacts of something that didn’t listen. Something that didn’t stop when it should have.

I sit in my room with the curtains drawn tight, shutting out the sun before it can shrivel me where I sit. The air is stale, thick, clinging to my throat like it wants to keep me quiet. I tell myself I’m just tired. Just worn down. But the shadows twitch when I’m not looking. Mocking me.

I keep my eyes on the floorboards, so as not to give them more reason to find humour in my emasculated ruin. The great man I was supposed to be- reduced to this trembling thing hunched in the dark. Humorous, isn’t it? What once stood as brute strength is now a frail excuse of a man.

Sometimes- when the light slips through a crack in the curtain- I see it. A shape. A face, maybe. Or the memory of one. It flickers in the dust like a smudge I can’t seem to wipe clean. I blink, and it’s gone. But the afterimage stays burned behind my eyelids, pulsing like a bruise.

My skin crawls. It feels too tight again, like it’s fermenting around me. Rotten humanity sealed under a layer that refuses to breathe. I dig my nails into my arms just to feel something real, something that isn’t him.

Morning drags itself into the room before I’m ready for it. A thin, sickly light leaks through the curtains, prying at the edges like fingers trying to peel me open. I haven’t slept- not really. My thoughts kept pacing the walls all night, wearing grooves in the dark. By the time the sun rises, something inside me has snapped into a strange, buzzing alertness.

I stand too quickly. My legs twitch beneath me, jittery, unreliable, as if they’re trying to outrun me—their consciousness weighing down on them. Or their wariness of what I’m becoming. My hands won’t stay still either. They flutter and shake and claw at my arms, at my chest, at the seams of my skin. I can’t tell if I’m trying to hold myself together or tear myself out.

The room feels smaller in daylight. The air tighter. Every breath scrapes. I pace, back and forth, back and forth, like a trapped thing gnawing at the bars. My skin pulls taut with every movement. Tugging. Tightening. As though it’s stitching itself shut around me. A cocoon I never asked for. Let alone deserved. A cocoon I’m terrified I’ll never break out of.

I run my fingers over my arms and swear I can feel the threads- thin, invisible, weaving themselves through me. Each step I take cinches them tighter. Each breath knots them further. Sealing me away from the world. Or perhaps from whatever I used to be.

My reflection in the window startles me. The sun hits the glass just right, and for a moment, I see a face that isn’t mine. It couldn’t- no, it shouldn’t be mine. An unrelenting figure. Warped and stretched thin by the night’s terrors. A carcass of what once was.

I stumble back, heart hammering against the cage of my ribs. The cocoon tightens with each beat. Breath stuttering. I manage to let out a laugh, followed by a sharp groan from the repercussions of humour. What else can a man do when he’s trapped inside the very thing he’s become.

The morning light keeps pressing in, relentless, exposing every crack, every stitch, every place where my humanity has begun to rot. And I move through it in frantic bursts, a creature unravelling and reweaving itself in the same breath. Desperation clawing at the seams that tighten with each glimmer of hope.