Falling Upward

Lyrics

The ground was a mirror reflecting a silver sky.
No, the sky was a mirror reflecting the ground.
No.
The sky was the ocean and I was underneath it, looking up.
The gravity was a question I forgot to answer.
I let go of the floor. Or the ceiling.
Started to rise, slow, a bubble of breath in a silver library.
The air thinned into something thicker.
The first drop on my tongue wasn't salt.
It was the opening chord of a song I knew from a life I hadn't lived yet.
My feet left the polished obsidian of the world's roof.
And I began to fall. Up.
The ocean was above me, a ceiling of endless waves.
And the water tasted like every song I'd ever loved at once.
A thousand melodies braided into a single flavor.
I decided to breathe.
I opened my mouth and breathed it all in.
The inhale didn't drown me. It indexed me.
The waves stopped their churning and became slow-motion nebulae.
Galaxies I could hold, rearrange with a thought.
I reached out to name them, the constellations of my own history.
I tried to count my fingers to be sure, and the left hand showed me seven, the right showed me a mirror.
The reality check folded back into itself.
This was more real than real.
A spiral arm of light tasted like my mother's humming.
Another, a cold, dark patch, was the silence after a door closed forever.
The ocean was above me, a ceiling of endless stars.
And the water tasted like every song I'd ever loved at once.
A thousand histories braided into a single flavor.
I decided to breathe.
I opened my mouth and let the starlight breathe me.
A door handle made of mercury grew from the nothing beside me.
It opened onto the floor I had just left.
The infinite hotel corridor of my own spine.
A shadow in the corner wore my face from yesterday.
It didn't move. It just watched me rewrite the physics.
I took the galaxy named 'Regret' and folded it into the one named 'The Drive Home'.
The colors bled together. The song changed keys.
The shadow nodded. Or maybe it was just a phosphene behind my dream-eyes.
I am floating in the archive.
I am the archivist.
The water is the ink. The stars are the words.
Falling upward into the catalog of myself.
The taste is fading now.
Just one note left on the tongue.
A perfect, silent C.