When the mind stops running
You thought you were lost, but the place you were in just couldn't be reached by thinking.
You can be gone a long time before you notice.
You eat. You answer. You laugh in the right places.
Underneath, a thinness you cannot name. A room with the heat turned a few degrees too low.
Years can pass like this. Standing slightly to the left of your own life. Watching someone who looks like you sign your name, kiss the people you love on the forehead.
Then one morning you hold a cup of coffee.
You feel the weight of it. The small heat coming through the ceramic into your palms.
You do not move for a minute.
And the coffee has a temperature again.
The light in the room has a direction.
The thing that has been sitting on your chest for weeks gets smaller, not because anything changed, but because you stopped running long enough for it to settle next to you.
You were never gone.
You were somewhere the mind could not follow while it was running.
The part of you that has been waiting does not ask where you have been.
It sets down a chair.