modern needle
“The Hum Beneath My Skin”
I. The Sinking — The First Hum
there’s a hum living beneath my ribs, a quiet trembling sound that started the day you left.
i hear it most at night — it vibrates through my bones, soft at first, almost like the whisper of your voice when you still loved me.
but the hum grows sharper each time i remember the way you smiled, how it lit every corner of me i didn’t know were dark.
now every memory is a weight, pulling me under inch by inch.
grief is not loud.
it sinks.
it drags.
it tightens around the ankles like invisible hands asking you to stay beneath the surface.
and i do.
i stay.
i sink with whatever’s left of me.
II. The drowning — The hum becomes a blade
the hum sharpens in the drowning.
it’s no longer quiet — it becomes a thin blade pressed against the inside of my chest, scraping every time i breathe your name.
sometimes i wonder if drowning feels like this: not water, but the heaviness of unsaid goodbyes pushing against my lungs.
i imagine you sometimes — not your real self, but the version of you i created to survive the nights you never came back.
i imagine death sometimes — not as an ending, but as an unmaking, a quiet unraveling from the inside out.
i imagine my heart bleeding out slowly, not with blood, but with every memory that refuses to die.
and the hum grows louder, Louder, LOUDER — until it slices through me with the gentle cruelty of a truth i never wanted to face:
you were already gone long before i learned how to let go.
III. The bleeding — The hum becomes a wound
there’s a kind of bleeding that leaves no marks.
i feel it now — a slow leak of everything i used to be.
i bleed in the places where your absence carved its home: the quiet corners of my thoughts, the hollow behind my sternum, the space between my ribs where your warmth used to rest.
this bleeding isn’t dramatic — it’s patient, methodical, steady.
i’m not dying — not really — but i’m losing pieces of myself every time i remember that you stopped loving me first.
and the hum beneath my skin begins to sound like a dying star, collapsing quietly under its own weight.
it hurts, god, it hurts — but not in a way i can scream about.
it’s the kind of pain that makes you go silent mid-sentence because something inside you just gave up.
the kind of pain that cuts without cutting.
IV The silence — The hum fades into nothing.
there comes a point in every descent where the hum finally breaks.
mine shatters into silence.
not the comforting kind, not the soft peace you find after healing — but the eerie silence that rings so violently it makes your ears ache.
the silence that comes after a heart stops struggling to be understood.
the silence that feels like a room where no one returns, a night with no tomorrow, a breath that refuses to rise again.
and in that ringing silence, i realize something:
i’m not whole anymore.
i don’t know when it happened, but somewhere in the sinking, somewhere in the drowning, somewhere in the bleeding — i died a little.
not a death of body, not a death of breath,
but a death of the boy who once believed that loving you would save him.
now, only the echo remains.
and even that is fading.
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