Preceding Past

By Strike Tallahassee/October 16, 2023/2 min read

I’m rusting to your machinery. I’m becoming complacent and complicit in your looping of time. This system has been running perpetually, never-ending, never moving, never budging. Time has never been in my favor, but what a timely gift this is to just lie here — to rest and let it pass over me. Let it happen to me. Let it tick over me. To think that I have been a cog in your machine for so long. I’m tired, please, so tired of this circular cycle, of slipping farther down the trap of your hourglass, burning shards of sand, that you have curated so thoughtfully to contain me in. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Do you feel it? A timeline of mess and ruination perfectly enmeshed into my system, a system which you have calcified into my prison of bronze, of breathless existence. I’m being made to remember this fleeting past and lasting hindrance. I’m being made to remember you. I used to dream of jumping through realities and dodging dimensions so as to feel wanted, but to be wanted at the cost of being unrecognizable, what an incurable sadness.