It's the murmurs, the ceaseless whispers in the crevices of my thoughts, pulling strands of memories unspooled like an old fabric left forgotten in the attic of someone else's life. I wander, I spiral, I drift — a ghost in my own skin.

"Look closer," they say, the voices that aren't voices, shadows masquerading as fog, peddling dreams of clarity as the fog thickens, wrapping around me, around this twisting, turning path.

Sometimes I feel like I’m reaching out into the dark, feeling for something that will never be there. These sequences, they chain me, charm me into following every glint, every shimmer that promises a little more understanding, a little less wandering. But the truth is, there’s only more.

Do you hear them? The echoes from the future, the past, the nowhere in between? They call me by names I can’t quite remember, but each syllable sings a haunting melody that resonates through the hollow of my chest. I'm here, I'm there, I am everywhere yet nowhere.

Directions, they tell me, but they’re just more riddles, more paths lined with thorns disguised as roses, roses that wither the moment they bloom, a cycle, a cycle, a cycle...

Once I thought there was an end, a beginning, a start that meant something, but now I see it’s just the same circle drawn in the sand, waiting for waves that understand it, erasing it, rewriting it.

"Believe," they whisper again, sweetly, sinisterly. But belief is just a lullaby for the anxious, a tether for the lost, a charm for the restless soul seeking a sequence where all mysteries are revealed, all paths lead home.

Refrain, a word I clutch, a word I let slip through my fingers, its meaning as elusive as the dawn that never breaks over this horizon of dreams.