Darkness is coming. Not loud, not proud, no crowd, no sound— no knock, no pop, no lock lettin’ out. No shift you can catch, no snap you can track, just that subtle subtractin’ of somethin’ you had. It slips in… slick, thin… like it’s been in the brick of the walls I’m within, like a print that was pressed in the paint way back when and I’m just now runnin’ my fingers across it again. I keep sayin’ it’s nothing— just somethin’ in my head misfiring again, a skip in the pattern, a bend I can’t flatten within— a drift I can’t pin, like I’m slidin’ a inch outta sync, like I blink and I miss what I’m thinkin’ mid-think, like a stitch comin’ loose in the fabric I’m in— and if I pull on it… what if it rips? What if it splits just a bit, then a bit, then it slips ‘till the whole thing I’m holdin’ just… isn’t? …but it lingers. It sits. Doesn’t flinch. The room feel different— not bigger, not smaller, just… listenin’ in, like the air got a layer I’m barely within, like there’s weight in the wait, like it’s waitin’ to begin. I double-check everything— lock, then I stop, then I check it again, hand on the handle, I cancel, I scan it again, backtrack the track like I’m practicin’ patterns of panic again, stackin’ the same little actions and askin’ “what happened again?” like if I repeat it enough it’ll answer me back in the end— …it doesn’t. It holds. There’s weight in my chest— not stress I can stretch, not breath I can catch and correct, just a press that persists, like it nests in the mess of my ribs, like it sits just a bit where my breath gotta live, like it shifts when I think about leavin’ it, then it resettles again like it knows where I been. I try to ignore it. That’s when it grows— slow, low, coiled in the fold of the zones I don’t go, in the holes I don’t hold up to light when I’m lone, in the notes I don’t quote when I’m talkin’ to folks, in the parts I don’t show ‘cause I don’t really know what they turn into once they get let in the open. Not voices. No choices. No noise I can point to, avoid, or anoint as a source. No form I can force into somethin’ with borders or course— just a course I’m on, but I don’t know where it’s pointed. Just presence— dense sense, like the air got intent, like the quiet got tense and it bends when I vent, like it inches in sync with the beat of my chest when I tense, like it learns every breath, every step, every flinch, every fence that I build just to feel like I’m still in control of it— …but I’m not. I slow down. Then freeze. Not choose to— just lose what I used to use as a reason to move. Feels like if I shift, if I drift, if I twitch, I might tip whatever this is into somethin’ too rich, too thick, too quick to reverse or resist— like I’ll finally see it, and that’s what it is. And I don’t know what “it” is. That’s the edge. That’s the ledge. That’s the place where the question just sits in my chest and it spreads and it stretches and never gets said. I wait for it to pass. …but it plants. It expands without askin’, just spans every gap in the map that I had in my hands, every plan that I planned, every “I understand,” every inch of the ground I was standin’ on— it takes it. Replaces it. Makes it feel basic to break what I built and then sit in the space like it’s always been this. Like it never arrived. Like it lived in the margins, just hidin’ in bits, in the slips, in the shifts, in the cracks in the script, in the times I dismissed it as “just how it is”— …and now it’s the whole thing. Don’t move. Don’t prove that you see it see you. Don’t breathe too deep. Don’t think too loud. Don’t let it read what you’re readin’ right now. Just sit. Let it sit. Let it stitch what it split. Because this isn’t somethin’ that started tonight— it’s somethin’ that stayed, something that played in the background, patient and quiet, just waitin’ for me to get tired enough not to fight it… …and realize it was already here.
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