Happiness detonates. I am thrown into sudden orbit, lifted and dizzy, spinning around the nucleus of my own skull, where thought accumulates, dense, molten, irresistible, and yet lethal in gravity. There is no slope, no gentle incline toward joy. There are levels—shells of sensation, discrete, unyielding—and I leap between them like a trapped electron, flung outward by unseen laws. The moment the air shimmers; I am electric, incandescent, almost too bright to bear. The next, the shell collapses beneath me.
It hurts. It hurts to imagine the future. Even the possibility of light hurts because the memory of darkness is so sharp it cuts through skin, down to the stinging chest. I orbit, circling the possibility of happiness, circling, and yet I feel the pull of disappointment like a tether, knotted and unbreakable. Sometimes the tether tightens, and I cannot breathe; I am a planet dragged by the gravity of my own expectation, and yet I ache for the next excitation, the next flash.
There is a rhythm to it. A cruel music. One moment long, a wave swelling from nothing to the apex, my body vibrating in unison, the air itself alive, words fluttering like birds in a cage too small, too bright. One moment short: a sharp silence, a snap, a shutter closing in my chest. And I remember the past, each misstep, each lost chance, each hope that cracked in my hands, and the memory reverberates as if it were still happening, as if I were still caught in the orbit of disappointment. And while after hours of help I can express the partial essence of my now, when I speak, I speak so plainly, so wrongly, I do not think. For words that flow out of my mouth must be easy to soothe another. They are false. Is it worth being a human being when the world of poetry lives within and dies without? Speaking betrays my essence and with it, a pang banging my chest, physical, real. A sharp mallet against the body’s drum.
The brain hums. Dense, molten, unavoidable. Around it I revolve, a captive electron, feeling the tug of all possibilities at once—the brilliance, the void, the ache of desire, the sharp sting of memory, the cruel pull of tomorrow. And I move. I move in sudden bursts, bright, then gone. I orbit. I wait. I ache.
Often it shatters, scattering like stars across the floor of my skull, leaving me in darkness heavier than any orbit.
The potential persists. The future waits, radiant and cruel, a promise hanging by a thread, and it hums against the core of me, daring me to jump, to orbit higher, to risk the explosion of light again. But I am trapped. The shells are fixed. I am confined. Each leap is measured by the laws, by the density of the nucleus, by the inescapable architecture of my own mind. Happiness is a firefly in a jar, bright but fleeting, and I reach, and the glass cuts my palms. And yet I reach again.