Overnow

The loop is broken now. 
Over and over, that familiar track, 
the worn groove of repetition, 
finally smooth, finally empty. 
 
No more echoes in the well. 
 
And what spills out instead? 
A silence so wide it swallows 
the old words, the rehearsed phrases, 
the careful explanations I used to offer 
to the reflection in the quiet window. 
 
I search for the script, 
the manual for self-address, 
but the pages are blank sheets now, 
or perhaps they were never mine to begin with. 
 
I don't know what to say to me. 
The me that listens is a stranger 
wearing my old coat. 
 
I was just thinking, adrift in the afternoon light, 
how this quiet waiting, this lack of striving, 
feels like the very core. 
The dense, heavy center. 
 
The contentness of my life, 
it is not a place, not an achievement, 
but a soft settling, like dust after a long journey. 
 
And this is where the shape shifts again. 
I think it is an individual, 
a specific gravity pulling at the edges, 
that is a name. 
 
My name, perhaps, 
or the name of the space between breaths. 
 
My life, this collection of moments 
I have carefully, clumsily lived, 
it seems to me a name too, 
a specific label affixed to this passing through. 
 
A name for me to be 
a name of this world, 
a tiny marker on the vast, indifferent map. 
 
And I think it is a good thing to know this, 
this simple fact of naming, 
of being named, 
that it is what it is. 
No grand explanation needed. 
 
The water simply flows downhill. 
The stone is simply heavy. 
 
And I think, with a strange calm, 
that this might be the end of my time here, 
not a dramatic curtain fall, 
but a quiet recession of the tide. 
 
The shoreline pulling back, 
revealing the sand beneath the surface noise. 
 
And I miss me. 
The me that was perpetually striving, 
the me that was always trying to catch up 
to some imagined finish line. 
 
I miss that frantic energy, 
that constant, self-inflicted pressure. 
 
I miss the old cycles, 
the familiar anxieties that kept the heart beating fast. 
 
I miss the me I kept chasing, 
over and over, 
more than I knew then, 
more than I could possibly admit. 
 
Knew, now, in this gentle stillness, 
that the chasing itself was the only thing left. 
And now, only the quiet. 
Over and over, the missing.

rap, trap, hip hop