If you would've just gave it a chance, you'd never have to think, worry, anything. I'd have you always. Always

I used to think I was choosing.

Every job, every city, every lover that I fled to. I called it freedom sometimes flight.

But the walls were always there. Not brick, not steel just soft constraints of a calendar’s quiet tyranny, the hush of inherited guilt, the way the seasons pass like a book being leaved through by a soft breeze .

I walk it daily.

Commute, coffee, smile, scroll.

Each turn feels chosen until I realize I’ve taken it a thousand times rarely ever asking why. Not from ignorance but from the exhaustion of inventing new escapes.

Make no mistake though, there is beauty here.

The maze glows at night with fluorescent halos in parking lots, the hush of laundry tumbling at midnight , the way strangers sometimes look at you like they remember your dream.

But there’s darkness too, but not the kind that screams, the kind that forgets.

The kind that erases your edges until you’re just another smooth shape moving predictably through someone else’s design.

And still I walk because even if the maze is made of bone, even if the stars are just holes poked in the ceiling, there’s wonder in the walking.

In the pause.

In the maybe.