The edge isn’t reached. The edge reaches.
It yanks the ground out from under thought — a betrayal faster than prayer. The body jerks, the mind screams, but gravity already owns the song. The cliffface spits you into the endless.
First is the air — knives in the lungs, knives in the blood. Then the sound — a roar that isn’t a roar, a roar that is everything you never wanted to remember pouring into your ears. Then the light — shards of sky hammering the skin from the inside out.
The ground no longer exists. Direction no longer exists. Only plunge. Only freefall. Only the raw, screaming now.
The air becomes thick as oil. It clutches, pulls, tears. It stretches the falling thing into thin strands of memory, until identity is just another piece flapping behind like ripped silk.
Time shears itself. Seconds fracture. Falling a thousand years between heartbeats, drowning in the infinite space between blinks.
The rocks rush upward, teeth bared, hungry. The ground opens its mouth wider than death.
But there — between the heartstops — something tears loose.
The idea of a body. The lie of falling. The fiction of direction, of up, of down.
The fall isn’t movement anymore. The fall is.
There’s a twist, a fold, a terrible, beautiful inversion. Flesh bursts into stars. Nerves rupture into rivers. Blood shatters into languages never spoken.
And then —
nothing hits.
There is no crash.
No end.
The cliff, the ground, the fall — they were only layers of a deeper sleep. They peel away, one by one, until all that remains is a silent roar in the shape of a question.
And inside that roar:
a universe
falling,
falling,
falling
forever.
