Termites

Notes on what we hide and what hides us

You think you’ve seen madness? No, you haven’t. Madness isn’t the man screaming on the street or the one stripped bare under the rain. Madness is quiet. It begins like termites in wood — you don’t notice it until the whole house groans. I saw it, I swear I did.

He was sitting there, scratching at his chest as if he wanted to dig out his own heart. His nails left red trails across his skin, and still he kept clawing, whispering, “out, out, out,” as though something was living inside him that did not belong to him. His breathing, friends — it wasn’t breathing anymore. It was wheezing, grinding, like rusted hinges trying to force open a locked door.

And his face… ah. His mouth twisted into shapes no mouth was meant to take. Half a grin, half a scream, as though he was trapped between laughter and terror. His lips were bleeding where he had bitten them raw, and when he laughed — yes, he laughed — it bubbled wet, like something drowning in its own spit.

I could not move. Because the proverb says: the man who sees a masquerade and calls it a child will still pay when the drums begin to sound. And I knew this was no masquerade. This was raw humanity, peeled open like rotten fruit.

He began talking to the shadows, begging them to be silent, though they had said nothing. Then he slammed his forehead against the wall — once, twice — until the plaster cracked and blood smeared down in crooked lines, like a child’s finger painting. Still, he smiled. Smiled! As though pain was the only language left he could trust.

And then he whispered it, low, almost tender: “Is this all we are? Flesh trying to remember it once had a soul?”

I swear to you, the silence that followed was heavier than any scream. The room itself felt like a coffin. And for the first time, I could not tell if I was watching him break — or if he was simply showing me the cracks I had been hiding from myself all along.

Because, the mirror was not on the wall. It was in our hands, bleeding, and we could not put it down.

Shuaib.