Title: Shards Of Me Poem by ashok jadhav

(A dimly lit room. The speaker paces, clutching their head, speaking to an unseen presence—or perhaps to themselves.)
Monologue:
Do you see it? Do you see what I've done?
Every step I took… every word I whispered… it built this prison around me.
Guilt claws at my chest, sharp and insistent, and yet—I can't look away from what I've lost.
Her face… always her face… haunts the corners of my mind, smiling at me,
and I—fool—I could never reach her. Never touch what was never mine.
And now… now I am haunted not just by her absence,
but by the relentless ticking of time.
Each gray hair, each ache, each breath brings me closer to… the end.
Death. Aging. The slow theft of everything I thought I was.
Who am I if not the man who could save her? Who could fight?
Or is that just another lie I tell myself, to keep this fragile mask in place?
I see mirrors that aren't mirrors. I hear voices that aren't voices.
Madness—or perhaps clarity?
They whisper my failures, my betrayals, my envy…
Yes, envy! I envy the living, the loved, the unburdened.
I would tear them apart if I could, and yet I tremble,
trapped in this endless reflection of my own weakness.
I betrayed them, betrayed myself… and who remains?
Only the hollow echo of a man who is afraid—afraid of everything,
afraid that the life he lived was never his to live at all.
So I walk among the shadows of my own mind,
grasping at fragments of identity, at shards of self-worth…
but the pieces refuse to join.
Perhaps I am not a man. Perhaps I am just regret walking on two legs,
a monument to obsession, a shrine to failure,
forever imprisoned by love I could not claim,
by jealousy I could not deny,
by madness I cannot escape.
(Pauses, almost whispering.)
Do you see it? Do you feel it?
This… emptiness… this unbearable, searing emptiness…
I am lost. I am nothing.
(He sinks slowly to the floor, clutching his head, as if trying to hold himself together, but the shadows of his mind close in.)