The Self That Remains – Riptiva Roy

Source: https://figments.princeton.edu/2025/12/11/the-self-that-remains-riptivia-roy/ Parent: https://figments.princeton.edu/

I have walked inside myself

and found corridors\ \ that twist without end,

where echoes do not die,

they multiply.

The eyes I carry

belong to every gaze that shaped me;

stumbling through this fragile world,

they brush against half-formed faces,

then spiral inward,

toward what I have lost

and toward the shadows

I thought were buried.

Whatever love lingers

shivers in the corners,

a flicker too small to hold.

Something stirs along the spine of memory,

a shadow that never sleeps,

stalking my steps

through hallways that belong to no one.

I keep walking.

I carry a fractured light

inside my chest,\ \ its tremor brushing against walls

that are cold, cracked, and callous.

The echoes thin as I walk,

leaving only the ghost of their noise;

silence swollen with what it swallowed,

waiting for the pause between heartbeats\ \ to remind me of what I can never name.

I press my palm to the wall.

It resists.

I hear blood through veins

that are neither mine nor another’s,\ \ furious with a hunger that wants

everything and nothing.

Sometimes I whisper to the dark,

and the dark whispers back:

that all the chambers\ \ I have claimed for myself

are already empty.

Yet I have kissed this hollow,

tasted the salt of my own anger,

and found it sweeter than any lips I ever held-

even in passing, even in absence.

I know this void will hold me without shame

long after the rest of the world forgets me.

In its depths, the self reveals itself:

the soul is a twisting maze,

warping memories in its winding ways;

sharp, cold, dripping with what I wanted

and what I could not have.

I inhale its void anyway,

letting it fill my lungs\ \ so that when I exhale,

there is only the smoke—

the faint warmth I once refused

to let the world touch.

My passages: threadbare,

trodden, forever alone.

What could compare

to the heartbeat of a self

that has learned to survive\ \ within its own labyrinth?

Listen: it still beats.