Alive Enough

My chest is a locked room, the walls closing in, breath trembling like glass about to shatter. Everyone says breathe, as if air were loyal, as if lungs weren’t traitors. But inside this storm, I see the most fragile truth— that I am alive enough to feel my heart break its own rhythm, alive enough to know how much I don’t want to vanish. There is beauty in this terror— the kind that rips you open, shows you the raw shape of yourself, a human body begging the universe to keep it whole.