Dreaming Corpses

I am alone here, but not empty. There is still a weight resting on my chest, a pressure I know does not belong to me, gentle and uninsistent, like a hand that once held me without asking and yet exactly right. The body still responds, not out of desire but out of habit. An imagined warmth travels along the thigh, over bone, settles in the hollow of the neck. The body has learned how to feel absence as a form of presence. Breathing—if it can still be called breathing—has slowed. The space grows dense, as if the air itself knows better than to move too much. Every shift, every remembered gesture feels like it could be the last. Touches no longer arrive anywhere, yet they keep happening. A hand glides across the body with no clear owner. The boundary between myself and another has long since dissolved. The body belongs to no one now, and is not entirely released. In this stretched darkness, dreams no longer resemble sleep; they resemble staying—staying inside a moment that was never meant to last, yet has expanded to become everything. If there is an ending, it does not feel like a cut, nor like forgetting. It feels more like a complete stillness, the moment when the body no longer attempts to wake and finally allows everything it has been touched by, everything it has lost, to settle and sleep inside it forever.