The darkness fills you. Twists and rolls, penetrating every orifice a soul can have. Like a dream you can’t wake up from, your brain screams to kick, kick your way through to fresh air, but your legs hang mute just below. 

Months pass like years, your energy growing at a snail’s pace, until you’ve finally conserved enough to force your limbs to listen. Surface tension ruptures with the nostalgia of your first labored breath of stale but refreshing air, and you begin your climb back up, as far from your prison cell as your body will take you. A feeling of triumph explodes in your chest, driving your passionate leaps towards an unfathomable ceiling; but it can’t last. Those closest to you appear; malevolent tendrils of the tar that enslaved you swaying menacingly over their shoulders as they patiently await the moment to strike. The feelings that fed your flight begin to ebb, an ocean of wasps gushing from the mouths of loved ones, inflating the sliver of fear until it swallows the light that guided you, replacing it with whispers that grow into a cacophony, the scream of a thousand hushed voices begging for you to turn back. 

Limp. 

That which could save you from gravity’s mountainous grasp sits idly by. So you fall. 

Every ounce of frantic thought, knotted – tangled – in an attempt to rewrite the universe’s legislature, though all for not: there is no escape. And as you begin to accept your place in the dark molasses below, fingers sprout from nothing, something, everything.

A pendulum, swinging from its toe fulcrum. 

And I ask myself: what now?