The Gravity Of Staying

Some mornings, the ceiling gains density
A pale, persistent astronomy pressed upon my chest
I count the cracks like constellations
Mapping a sky I'm too tired to navigate

This body has become a careful echo
Repeating motions etched in silent film
I brush my teeth with the ghost of purpose
Dress myself in the fabric of routine
A costume wearing thinner than dawn

And the world outside moves in pleasant rhythms
A symphony I hear through thick, stained glass
I press my palms against the transparent barrier
No sound, just the vibration of elsewhere

I don't want a new life, I want a new physics
A law where exhaustion has escape velocity
To shed this orbit of familiar ache
To let the tethers of expectation snap like old string

Not a journey, but an atmospheric exit
A slow, majestic unraveling from the axis of the known
To be neither here nor there, but in the becoming
In the glorious, weightless fracture between

Conversations have turned into sonar pings
Bouncing off my hull, returning hollow data
I nod at appropriate intervals
A convincing algorithm of presence

Meanwhile, a quiet riot brews in my marrow
A migration of self toward some internal pole
I am curating a museum of untouched dreams
Dusting frames of landscapes I've never seen
While my own reflection fogs the glass

I've grown fluent in the dialect of fatigue
Written treatises on the architecture of stillness
My willpower, a dial turned to a frequency
Only static answers, in a language of gray

I don't want a new life, I want a new physics
A law where exhaustion has escape velocity
To shed this orbit of familiar ache
To let the tethers of expectation snap like old string

Not a journey, but an atmospheric exit
A slow, majestic unraveling from the axis of the known
To be neither here nor there, but in the becoming
In the glorious, weightless fracture between

If change is a door, then I am the wall it's set in
Solid, seemingly permanent, bearing the weight of structure
But even walls contain particles in constant, desperate vibration
Dreaming of being mortar no more
Of being sand again, scattered by a wild, untamed wind
To remake myself into a dune on a foreign shore
Or the curve of a canyon that remembers only erosion and sky

So let the momentum of sameness dissipate
Let the film reel of today finally jam and burn
I am not running away
I am conducting a quiet coup d'état
Against the regime of my own endurance

The rebellion is a whisper, a slow leak of light
I am preparing the ground
For a different kind of gravity
One that pulls, not down
But outward