Oobe [updated] 〈SAFE〉

Not painfully. More like a rubber band letting go. I shot up through the roof, past the satellite dish, past the low clouds that felt like wet cotton against my face. The town shrank to a circuit board. Rivers became silver zippers. The curve of the Earth appeared, blue and brutal. I kept rising.

He never came back down.

There is a version of me still rising. Still passing the bride, the firefighter, the man with the tie. Still heading for the dark between stars. Not painfully

The Earth was a dime. My house was less than dust. My feverish body, that little animal pinned to a mattress, was already being forgotten by the universe. And that was the real terror. Not death. Scale . The absolute, hilarious indifference of altitude. The town shrank to a circuit board

I fell through every layer, screaming without a throat, and slammed back into myself so hard I bit my tongue. Blood on the pillow. My mother never stopped knitting. The fever broke an hour later. I kept rising