By: Emily Authement

The air in this room is thick,
A dense, unmoving water
I have to push through just to stand.
It is not fear, exactly,
More of the architecture of what might be.

My mind is a flickering screen,
Showing futures that haven’t happened,
Each frame a sharp calculation
Of loss or unexpected suddenness.
The furniture here is real
The grain of the wooden table,
The weight of the ceramic mug in my hand,
But I keep missing its texture.

I am always leaning into the next minute,
The next hour, the one inevitable conflict.
My body, a coiled spring,
Resists the soft gravity of now.

The anchor drops heavily,
Not into the future,
But into the quiet, inconvenient truth
Of being simply present,
The only space where the mind can finally
Stop outrunning itself.