Fade

Fade

A steady trickle down my cheek, feathery tickle.
But I cannot laugh.
Finding a path between lips, coalescing with thick saliva.
A taste I cannot place. 
Salt and copper. 
Color begins leaking out of the universe.
Green grass becoming gray desert.
Blue sky becoming black night.
Mind twisting, undulating, vibrating in a luminous, fetid mass of sensory confusion.
Soft voices whispering in my ear, questioning me.
         Will the world cease to carry on now?
                   Do you think you mattered?
                             Was there a point to it all? 
In chorus they answer.
No.
Reality thinning, becoming only faint strands of memory with fraying ends. 
Once my savage master, never sparing the whip upon scarred and bleeding flesh. 
No longer. 
Shackles loosening. 
Each breath exhaling another memory, another piece of me, until I contain no more.
Hopes,
         dreams,
                   loves found,
                             loves lost.
Gone.
Body a puppet without a puppeteer.
Husk.
I am more cloud than bone and blood, floating. 
No longer eyes to see the beauty and misery,
ears to hear the sounds of laughter and the screams of agony,
skin to feel the soft caress of a lover’s lips and the pain of the rusty blade.
         Slowly, I merge with the other clouds, never understanding why I existed at all.