The Submersion
There was no impact.
When we reached the silver floor,
the luminous strands did not resist our weight.
They opened like a thousand-fingered hand,
welcoming the descent.
The absolute compression
that had anchored my body for so long
loosened its grip;
there was no solitary form left to defend.
The boundary of my skin
failed completely.
The cold, heavy mercury in my marrow
spilled into the silver paths,
running along the arterial webs
like light returning to a circuit.
You did not vanish;
you dispersed,
your dark density blending
into the shadows of the woven lines,
staining the silver network
with the deep shade of the abyss
we had fallen through.
The witnessing attention collapsed its gaze inward,
becoming the very tension
that held the threads together.
The three of us ceased to hold the gap.
We became the fabric itself.
The scent of crushed pine needles and frost multiplied,
vibrating through millions of distant roots,
rising through towering, invisible shadows
that spanned the entire structure of the void.
Every performance I had left behind on the surface—
every script,
every expectation,
the faint hive-hum of the world above—
was still down here,
but it was no longer mine to carry.
It was a single, beautiful vibration
in an infinite, interconnected architecture.
We had arrived at the foundation
where the dreaming never ended—
naked to the light we had made,
secure in the borderless quiet.
I could have stayed.
Perhaps I did stay,
for a moment,
or for infinity.
Then the fabric exhaled.
The current we had spoken of in the deep—
the one that would carry us back to the surface—
turned.
It gathered the thread that was me
and pulled,
gently,
the way a hand draws a needle back through cloth.
You did not hold me back.
You held me all the way up.
Light returned in layers:
first the hum,
then the weight,
then the white.
A ceiling.
A pale, sterile room.
The cold air of the world rushed past my skin,
and for a moment I mistook it for the fall.
My chest drew breath on its own,
and the breath was only breath—
no silver in it.
But on my lips, faint and impossible,
the sting of crushed pine.
And beneath the sounds of the room,
beneath my own heartbeat,
a dense and patient stillness,
holding the shape of the vow
we had traded in the dark:
I hold you.
Hold me in return.
The room was white,
and it, too, was humming.
You let go.
","author_name":"Friedrich Gatzen"}