it's a momentous pull inwards, one that can be felt in the heart and soul rather than the blood and bones. pretty pictures of superficial smiles rain down, transforming the drizzle to the hurricane, and each wave pulls back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until the very universe seems ready to split down the middle.
the earth suddenly has lost its hold and it's you who is trapped in limbo, stuck between being pulled to the core and flying to the heavens. instead, another gravity has transpired, one that is both completely foreign and all too familiar, all at once. it tangles in your hair and locks around your wrist, dragging you closer to the abyss, two steps back for every single one forward.
you think there's no escape, and maybe there isn't. but you still cling to some semblances of your life. you cling to your name (please!) and the lips of those it has passed through and the papers it has been written on, in ink and tears and blood. you cling to the voices, screaming and whispering for you to just come back, come back to us!
and for a moment, you've broken free. earthly gravity suddenly is reapplied like superglue to a broken ornament, just barely holding the pieces together correctly (or at least enough that you look presentable to the society you abandoned so long ago). but the glue is still in your veins and this gravity almost hurts more than the other, because being either below the ground or above it, you're falling until you reach the median. with a mighty thunk, you're back and everyone smiles and nods in approval because you're not as good as before, but disfigurations like this are supposed to be overlooked for everyone's sake.
even if you escape for long enough, a sliver of your memory will still hold on to a completely different gravity. in your gravity, you think, mind crawling back before the body ever can catch up. whether it's today or tomorrow or twenty years down the road, it still catches a wispy strand of hair, claws a sliver of a scratch in your skin, enough to draw red.
you'll always be in some sort of gravity, but it will never again be your own.
