The Weight

Everything feels slightly off,
like the world shifted half an inch
while I wasn’t looking.


The coffee tastes the same,
but it doesn’t land right on my tongue.
Even my own hands seem borrowed,
as if they remember something
I can’t return to.

I used to know how to fill a morning,
how to laugh without the echo catching
in my throat.


Now every corner holds a trace,
a sound, a smell, a pause;
and I walk through it
like a house rearranged overnight,
still reaching for light switches
that no longer exist.

People talk around me,
gentle, careful, as if sorrow might spill.
They ask how I’m doing
with the kind of softness
that expects nothing true.
So I nod.
Because the truth
is unsayable:
the world has a hole in it,
and somehow
I’m expected to keep living inside the gap.


But slowly,
something changes in the quiet.
Not a return,
not a cure,
but a kind of fragile understanding.
I begin to notice
the rhythm of my own surviving,
how breath, though heavy,
still moves through me.

I start piecing myself together
from fragments that don’t match,
a collage of before and after.
It’s clumsy, uneven,
but it’s living.


And maybe that’s enough,
to stand in the strange,
to love what was,
and to keep walking,
even when the world feels borrowed.