Sorrowful screams, wails of tribulation, ubiquitous thoughts of past regrets. The streets of death carry the heavy weight of incomplete accounts: stories with no ending. Souls that will forever live in a coma-like state unaware that their world is still rotating while they live in a timeless reality in which their mundane existence has even less significance. Here everyone is dead. Here it doesn’t matter how rich, powerful, kind you may have been. Here all that rules is the fate of finality. Finally, knowing that your existence was as futile as your story, dreams and aspirations.

Streets are plastered and engraved with timeless footprints, each heavier than the last as they carry the burden of their past life's mistakes. Though it seems they have forgotten they were once functional through the lifeline of oxygen. Here they just roam the streets in solidarity, maybe hoping to find that purpose that has broken the tether between their existence and the afterlife.

The emptiness secreted is palpable as millions and millions of souls wander as though their wings have been lost through the ages, trapped by the crushing reality of inescapability. Lost as time continues without them, as life passes them by and continues with another generation of sorrowful souls that will also inevitably become another body in a grave. Death’s scent overwhelms the already inordinate amount of pain. Death is not a sweet aroma: it’s a sickly, nauseating sensation that bombards any and all hope from escaping a numb tongue. Tongues that have been silenced for decades — whether that be by choice or force, I’m yet to discover, but I know for some the past may be too incriminating and scaring for even the eternality of time to erase. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, especially when some have never bled.

They hear the soft lullaby of whispering willows, as the sound waves prance around the streets, taunting the lost souls. They are tired, the dead pray for sleep, but sleep doesn’t help when it’s the soul that’s tired. A broken soul trapped in a bloodless body. 

They listen incessantly, viciously for the careful rhythm of a phantom heart that will never beat again. But was it even there in the first place? They question reality. Was there ever really a life before their shadows overtook their already hidden reality?