Epektasis

I sit on the mattress edge
where sleep loosens its hold.
Cold floor.
Cold air.

My knees protest as I rise —
a brief white flare.
My back answers later.
We bargain.

Morning rehearses itself:
Irn-Bru, sink, street, screen —
the routine of return.

I think about dirt —
how it keeps its record in layers:
bone shadow, seed trace,
char, rust, shard,
one century pressed into the next,
nothing discarded,
nothing entirely lost,
only buried deeper into use,
heat gathering
where nothing looks alive.

I think of those who wrote
under weak lamps,
hands stiff with age,
who kept working
as if addressed by something unseen,
as if silence itself were a summons,
who stopped because the body insisted,
not because the calling fell quiet.
I wonder what prayers
never found a language.

I place my hand on my chest.
The skin is thinner now.
Under it, the heart keeps time —
plain, exact.

I moved too quickly through years.
Mistook motion for living.
This is inventory.

Can I continue
without easing the truth?
Carry the days
without hardening?

No answer.
Only breath.
In.
Out.
The oldest contract.

A car passes —
tyres whispering water.
Someone laughs across the street,
bright, unguarded,
gone before I decide
what it costs me.

The world does not pause.
It keeps entering itself,
careless, astonishing.

I remain — unfinished,
tired, still warm,
holding the narrow fact
of being alive.

If I stay with what is here —
this room,
this body,
this hour —
practise attention
instead of meaning,

something small and durable
may yet form.
Not clarity.
Not rescue.
Only workable light,
enough to step forward
without disappearing.