The Wound

You've been here before. Not the room – this angle of light. A question you recognise by its weight. And here you are again. The same pattern. Closing with the patience of orbit. Trace the arc far enough and you find ellipse. The same curve, over and over. The work that asks who you are. The place that echoes the one you fled. Eyes holding something you almost remember. You thought you were running straight, that each new beginning was the last one. But the path curves back. A mass at your centre, unnamed, keeps pulling. You do not have to name it. You only have to become heavy enough to stay.

The Path

You dream of escape – one clean burn into the open. So you fire your engines, again, again, spending years as fuel. And still, the curve remains. Comets do not escape. They spend themselves. Each pass through the sun's fire burns another layer away. The tail you mistake for speed is your own substance streaming into the void. Let the engines quiet. The pull is still there. It never left. Find your distance – close enough to feel the pull, far enough to keep your shape. The centre you fled is the only thing that knows your name.

The Shadow

His mother held the long ellipse for years. He was eleven when she stopped correcting – when she let the centre take her. He watched her fall inwards until the light swallowed her whole. He swore his vow in the silence she left behind. Now he fires every engine outwards. Burns through fuel and years. The pull weakens; he calls it progress. The pull vanishes; he calls it victory. But without gravity to answer, a self has no edge. He feels it at his edges first. The unspooling. Memory unthreading from memory. He is not afraid. Nothing coherent enough remains to fear. He scatters into the void. Finally free of every centre. Finally indistinguishable from the dark. She has spent decades in the same long ellipse, firing the endless corrections that keep her whole. She is tired – tired of being a self that must keep choosing its distance. She shuts down her engines. The orbit tightens. With each pass the pull increases and the trajectory steepens – a homecoming. Then comes the line she cannot uncross. Where gravity's grip exceeds what structure can bear. She feels the stretch, the terrible lengthening. She tries to fire her engines but there's not enough of her left to respond. She scatters into a ring of debris around the thing she called home – each fragment still falling, still in love with the gravity that tore her apart.

The Cut