The furthest I've ever been from myself is standing still. Convincing myself the horizon was enough. That watching the colours bleed was the same as feeling them. That naming the distance meant I'd crossed it.
The river doesn't wait for permission. It cuts through everything I thought was solid, every ridge I built to mark where I'd stop. It doesn't care about my edges. It just moves. And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, that single figure, that's the version of me that stopped narrating and started walking.
I've been mapping skies my whole life. Cataloguing the reds, filing the purples, mistaking awe for arrival. But the ground under my feet has always been shifting. Iridescent. Unstable. Alive. And I kept pretending it was flat.
This is the meridian. Not the middle. The line where everything I've been watching finally demands I exist inside it.
