The meadow does not change. The faces return each morning, arranged exactly as before. The sun hangs motionless, and the clouds are painted in their endless curve. I speak to the air, and the flowers answer only with silence. It is beautiful, and it is unbearable. The children laugh, though their laughter never grows or fades. The river glitters, but it does not move, a silver wound that cannot heal. I tell the others I want to leave. They look at me as if I am broken, and they tell me the thought is impossible. Every day the same horizon. Every face a silent rhyme. I am breathing in the colors, trapped inside the frame of time. Their warnings follow me like echoes. The petals darken, the air grows heavy. They say the border is not meant to be touched, that nothing waits beyond. But the shadows tremble. The surface bends. Something on the other side is calling. Every day the same horizon. Every smile a borrowed line. I am bleeding through the colors, breaking out the frame of time. I run. Brushstrokes crack beneath my feet. Hands reach for me, the voices of those who never left. The sky shakes like wet paint, and every sound is the sound of tearing canvas. The frame is before me, glowing, a thin white line that divides the world. The silence splits open, and what lies beyond is not light, not darkness, but an endless depth that does not belong to me. Still, I push through. The meadow collapses behind me. The abyss opens. No more sun, no more horizon. All the clouds dissolve in white. I am falling out of colors, dripping from the frame of time. The world releases me. I slide down into nothing, a smear of paint dissolving on the floor. What was once a figure is only a stain.
