The Wound

You have been here before. Not this room – this angle of light. A question you recognise by its weight. The same pattern returning with the patience of orbit. Trace the arc far enough and you find the ellipse. The city that echoes the one you fled. Eyes holding something you almost remember. Even your surprise has a familiar shape. You thought you were running straight, that departure final. But the path curves. You've reached this point before, from the other direction. Something at the centre, patient as mass.

The Path

You dream of escape – one clean burn into the black. You fire your engines, burning years as fuel. The tail you mistake for speed is your own substance, spent. Let the engines go quiet. There is a distance – close enough to be held. Far enough to survive the holding. 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 and let the centre take her. He watched her fall inwards until the light swallowed her whole. The Liberated 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 to, a body loses its edge. The forgetting starts small: his sister's middle name. Then the sound of the front door closing. Then what he was running from. He is not afraid. Nothing coherent remains to be. He scatters into the void. Finally free of every centre. Finally indistinguishable from the dark. ❖ The Enduring spent decades in the same long ellipse, firing the small corrections to keep her whole. She is tired – tired of being a self that must constantly negotiate its distance. One morning the equations that once felt like freedom feel like arithmetic. She lets the engines die. The orbit tightens. Each pass closer, each pass faster – until orbit becomes descent. Then comes the pass she cannot survive. She is too close now – the pull stronger than anything she was built to hold. She feels herself thinning. The part that remembers pulls one way; the part that chose pulls the other. Between them, the self she spent decades building stretches, then tears. She shatters into a ring of dust. Each fragment still falling, still answering the gravity that tore it apart.

The Cut