There's a hollow space where my feelings used to be. Not a clean, empty room, but a scrapyard of rusted-out sensations. I can almost see the ghosts of them, the outlines of what anger, joy, or grief were supposed to look like. But when I reach out, my hand passes through cold, static air. I just feel a vast, endless nothing.

It’s not peaceful. It’s a suffocating, heavy nothing. It’s the silence after a scream has died in your throat, leaving only a raw, aching void. The world happens on the other side of a thick, distorted pane of glass. I see people moving, talking, laughing—their faces contort into masks of emotion I can no longer decode. It’s all just… noise. Meaningless data. A film I didn't want to watch, playing on a loop.

And in the center of this void, the only thing that still has any weight, any disgusting, pulsing warmth, is my ego. This pathetic, throbbing lump of meat in my head.

It’s not even a real thing. It’s a grotesque sculpture cobbled together from every insult I ever took to heart, every cheap compliment I ever preened over, every comparison I ever lost. It’s a nest of buzzing, anxious thoughts feeding on its own self-importance. It’s the only thing left that’s alive in here, and it’s a fcking parasite.

It screams where I feel nothing. It needs, it wants, it judges, it obsesses. It’s a frantic, desperate king ruling over a dead kingdom, issuing decrees to no one, polishing a crown that’s made of plastic and rot. It’s the part that cringes at my own reflection, that replays every stupid thing I’ve ever said, that constructs elaborate fantasies of revenge or success just to feel a single jolt of something—anything—that isn't this crushing numbness.

I hate it. I hate this world for creating it. I’m so tired of carrying it around. I'm tired of its constant, whispering commentary. I'm tired of its hunger. I'm tired of performing the motions of being a person while this thing, this meat, pulls the strings on a corpse.

The worst part is the isolation. You look at people and you know they’re being driven by their own messy, beautiful, terrible feelings. They’re connected to something. They’re alive. And I’m just here. A ghost with a tumor for a soul. A shell containing nothing but a self-aware, hateful voice that refuses to shut up.

I don’t feel the rain. I just feel the ego noting that my hair is getting wet and that it’s annoyed. I don’t feel connection. I just feel the ego calculating what to say next to maintain the illusion. I am a puppet, and the puppeteer is a raw, naked nerve ending that only knows how to feel itself.