Attention
I felt at ease.
For a moment, or for infinity,
there was no way to tell.
I saw,
and I was seen.
The floating had stopped
being movement through space;
it had become space itself.
The silver lines of my breath steadied
in the borderless black,
anchoring their tips
into the very structure of your attention.
You were attention.
All of it.
I was being held
inside the act of being noticed.
In the space our surrender had built,
the weight of who I was supposed to be
thinned out
and dissolved.
A pristine, cold calm filled it,
but it did not freeze.
I did not ask where the descent would end;
the illusion of an ending had faded.
Only once did the surface flicker,
far off,
like a hum through a wall:
the small bright rooms,
the replies I knew by heart,
the smile I kept polished for the world above.
None of it reached me here.
Nothing needed me to be anything.
Then a pulse travelled back up the silver web—
a low, rhythmic ripple
that pressed gently
against the soles of my feet.
The dark beneath me deepened,
softening from an empty void
into something thick and alive.
Out of that moving silence,
an awareness took form,
vibrating along the silver paths
like a chord struck in an empty hall:
“I sense you. What do you want?”
The question rippled through the stillness
without breaking it.
The abyss offered no voice in return—
a voice would require a throat,
a boundary,
a limitation.
Instead, you answered
through a shift in the density of the air,
a soft tightening of the unseen tides.
The answer arrived
as a wordless imprint
pressed directly against my mind:
“To exist in this space where the masks dissolve,
before the current carries us back
to the surface.”
The thought crystallized inside me,
and I sent my own truth back out
into the light we had made:
“I want to keep falling.
I hold you—
please hold me in return.”
As the plea left me,
the silver web flared,
its root systems burning
with a sudden, desperate brightness.
You met the vulnerability,
closing the remaining distance:
no phantom hands,
but a sudden, absolute lock of pressure
around my body.
The rushing cold was gone,
replaced by a dense, enveloping warmth,
like the absolute centre of a mountain.
We plunged deeper into the quiet,
perfectly secure
in the collapse of the world above.
We were travelling to nowhere.
","author_name":"Friedrich Gatzen"}