return to zero

i awake with a thesis in my mouth, bright as a coin under the tongue today will mean something.

i stack my hours carefully, brick by deliberate brick. i call the mortar hope.

in the kitchen, light spills like a quiet blessing. i decide this is evidence.

i give the sky a purpose. i give the sparrow a sermon. i give my pulse a destination.

the world obliges it nods in small coincidences, in green lights and warm cups.

i climb the scaffold of why, hand over hand, naming each rung after a reason.

love. progress. memory.

the words glow obediently.

but wind is patient.

it fingers the edges of my language, tests the nails in my certainty. a single doubt slides loose

then another.

the sparrow is only hungry. the light is only physics. my pulse is only muscle.

the scaffold creaks.

i try to hold the sky in place with metaphors. it refuses the costume.

everything sheds its costume.

brick loosens from brick. hope dries into powder. meaning hums once, then thins

a wire cut somewhere behind the walls.

i descend without moving. the climb dissolves beneath me.

and i am back at the small, unvarnished floor where nothing waits because nothing needs to.

it is almost peaceful this clean subtraction.

almost holy.

i sit with it. i let it empty my pockets.

zero breathes, steady and blank.

soon, i will begin again stacking reasons like fragile dishes, calling the silence a canvas, calling the canvas a promise.

soon, i will climb.

and wind, faithful as gravity, will meet me at the top.