The Scent
It came suddenly—
or perhaps it had been there all along,
dissolved in the dark ocean
filling my chest.
An emerging presence.
Something hauntingly familiar:
crushed pine needles.
It rose directly out of the silver web of my breath,
as if the glowing roots had finally struck
a subterranean nerve
hidden in the quiet.
I knew that smell.
It belonged to a forest
at the edge of an earlier life,
before the bright rooms began.
It flooded my throat,
crisp and cold,
scraping against the lining of my lungs.
With every slow draw of air,
the silver lines of the web flared
into an icy white.
The scent brought a sudden shock of weight—
the ghost of earth and towering shadows,
though there was still nothing to see.
The nerve endings across my skin
began to prickle
against an invisible chill.
The suspension was no longer passive.
I exhaled.
The breath left me,
but the scent did not drift away—
it condensed.
As the icy white vapour spread,
the void began to fracture
along the lines of the frost,
and beneath us the depth stiffened,
its unseen currents hardening
into something dense, heavy,
and undeniably solid.
The towering shadows
that had lingered behind my eyes
were rushing upward through the black now,
slicing through the borderless expanse
until the void wasn't empty anymore.
You shifted your pressure—
a sudden, sharp intake of weight,
like an unspoken recognition.
The earth we had invoked was unyielding,
and you held me against it,
your resonance vibrating
with its heavy cadence.
There was no longer a space between us
where an isolated thought could form.
We became a series of slow, rhythmic pressures,
a wordless expansion and contraction
that filled the void
like a shared pulse.
I felt you not as an observer
but as a dense, protective weight
that absorbed the chill
before it could touch my skin.
My own edges blurred around the corners
until my heartbeat wasn't entirely my own anymore;
it was tied to the slow, heavy cadence
of the dark beneath me.
Absolute shelter.
An unyielding gravity
that demanded no answer,
but simply held my entire existence
in its steady, quiet grip.
I let go.
","author_name":"Friedrich Gatzen"}