Epektasis

The water remembers
what it was built to do.
Ice seals the surface,
locks the shine into stillness,
but weight keeps working underneath.
Gravity does not retire.

I stood at the edge
with bread growing stale in my pocket
and hours held closed.
Cold kept everything in place.
Even sound learned restraint.

Ducks crossed the darkened skin
as if errands still mattered.
Swans took what I offered—
no pause,
no appraisal.
They did not ask how long they had been here
or what they should have become by now.
Squirrels seized and vanished.
No rehearsal.
No witness required.

Only we count ourselves—
years stacked like invoices,
patience renamed prudence
until it thickens into fear.
Forty years rung like a bell,
not a room stocked slowly
with hands that know how to endure,
with the hard knowledge
of what will never satisfy.

The reservoir was designed to restrain.
To wait without apology.
To collect force quietly
until someone decides
the land downstream deserves it.
Nothing here is idle.
Nothing is wasted.

Fear speaks clearly now:

You are not trapped—you are safe.
You have learned how to eat, how to pay,
how not to embarrass yourself with longing.
You know what happens to people who begin again:
they become cautionary tales,
burdens dressed as bravery.
You are needed as you are—predictable,
useful, tired in acceptable ways.
You have responsibilities.
Stay where you can be explained.

Something presses back—
not certainty,
not courage exactly,
but insistence.
A hand on buried stone.
Dust lifted from foundations
no one remembers approving.
A voice raised
before it learned how to sound reasonable.

Permission does not arrive.
It is taken,
and it takes something with it—
approval,
the shelter of being harmless.
Delay has its own cost.
So does motion.

Ice does not ask
whether it is ready.
It gives way unevenly,
with sound,
with consequence.
Not because it was young,
but because it was never meant
to hold this weight forever.

I will still work.
I will still pay.
But I will not confuse survival
with faithfulness.
I am afraid—
and stepping anyway.
I do not know where the water will run,
or whether it will be enough.