the void where fire once was

a whisper from the space between wanting out and wanting more

some days I feel carved out,
like someone scooped the electricity from my ribs
and left the hollow buzzing as a joke.


people call it “peace.”
they say it’s what healing is supposed to feel like.
but peace is just the name they give
to the absence of a crisis,
not the presence of meaning.

I miss the voltage.
not the pain-
but the sharpness.
the way terror made everything vivid,
the way longing made the world shake,
the way heartbreak cracked reality open
and let me feel something
that wasn’t lukewarm and survivable.

safety feels like sedation,
like someone turned the brightness down on living
and forgot to turn it back up.

maybe that’s why I keep drifting
to the line between wanting out
and wanting more-
that knife-thin place where at least
the air feels charged,
where I can hear my own heartbeat
like a warning,
or a promise.

this isn’t about dying.
and it isn’t about living.
it’s the ache of being trapped
in the middle:
too bruised for chaos,
too restless for calm.

a body raised in storms
never learns to trust quiet.
a mind forged in threat
mistakes boredom for the beginning of death.
a heart built from debris
expects collapse as punctuation.

so of course “normal” feels wrong.
of course steadiness feels like drowning
in water that refuses to move.

I’m not addicted to pain.
I’m addicted to intensity-
to the illusion that something
might burn bright enough
to make me feel real again.

but nothing burns like that now.
nothing scorches.
nothing sings.

it’s like living after the apocalypse
you barely survived:
the world is quiet,
the sky is blue,
and somehow that feels
more terrifying
than the fire ever did.

somewhere in me,
the girl who learned to live on impact
still presses her fingertips to the dark
and asks the question I hate most:

if this is living,
why does it feel like waiting?

and I still don’t have the heart
to give her an answer
that doesn’t break both of us.

-Koii