We climbed the winding hill, sunlight spilling like molten gold,
laughter tumbling from open windows, hearts drumming carelessly.
The road stretched soft beneath our hands, infinite,
a ribbon of hope unspooling toward somewhere unreachable,
every glance, every song, every shared breath a fragile miracle.
The air hummed with electricity. We were untouchable,
laughing, singing into the morning light.
Joy rolled through us like rivers of fire,
as if the world itself had paused,
holding its breath for us to be infinite.
Then the hill betrayed us. The asphalt cracked beneath the tires,
a jagged fracture splitting the road like a scream.
The bus shivered, teetered, then tipped,
slow-motion and instantaneous all at once.
Metal groaned...glass trembled, then exploded into frozen stars.
Time became a viscous river, stretching and folding upon itself.
We fell. Not downward, not upward, but through a distorted sky.
Gravity loosened, slipped from our bodies.
We spun, floated, twisted
weightless, yet each cell screamed.
The air thinned and thickened, rushing past ears and skin like water.
Our stomachs lifted, lungs soared, hearts thrummed in unison with the universe itself.
We were flying, yet falling, drowning, and dreaming all at once.
In that impossible hour, we glimpsed them faces etched in memory,
loved ones long gone, reaching, beckoning.
Grandparents, old friends, pets we had lost, strangers we had loved
all suspended, half in the world, half in light.
We stretched toward them, but fingers passed through warmth;
voices dissolved like smoke.
And yet a strange comfort brushed our souls: survival was no longer in flesh.
The bus twisted in the void. Metal screamed, windows shattered outward,
shards spinning like frozen fire. Dust clawed at lungs.
Wind tore our skin, yet we were not bound to it.
We became lighter, sharper, thinner souls untethered,
dancing above the wreckage, laughing and screaming in terror and wonder.
Below, the world fractured. Hands clawed at broken bodies,
faces twisted in grief, lifting what they thought were us.
We reached, shouted, tried to anchor ourselves,
but fingers passed through air, voices vanished.
The hollow-eyed shells on the grass stared back with our own recognition.
Alive above, dead below, suspended between heartbeat and void,
every heartbeat a razor, every breath a tether to memory and loss.
The hill rolled beneath us like liquid, dissolving under impossible angles.
Time fractured into shards; each moment bled into the next.
The sky became a mirror of the earth; the earth a reflection of the sky.
We drifted through laughter turned to echoes, through love turned to shadow,
through faces we could no longer touch.
And still we moved… half-light, half-shadow,
ghosts tethered to a world that could not see us.
Every cry cut through the silence, every laugh a blade.
The sun could not warm us, the wind could not carry us.
We were suspended between presence and absence,
between the pulse of the living and the hollow of our own eternity.
We were alive, yet not. Dead, yet still laughing.
Forever tasting the terror and wonder of falling without end,
of flying without freedom,
of seeing those we loved yet never being able to touch them.
Every heartbeat a reminder that we survived not as bodies,
but as something thinner, sharper, eternal,
witnessing the world through a veil we could never leave.
And then, beyond fear, beyond memory, beyond time itself,
we glimpsed the infinite.
A horizon of possibility folded upon itself,
light refracted through grief and love,
The world is stretching and fracturing like glass under impossible pressure.
We were part of it and apart from it,
motion without movement, life without weight,
haunting and luminous, suspended between heartbeat and void.
And so we moved… endlessly, hauntingly,
half-light, half-shadow,
alive, dead, caught forever
between the pulse of the world
and the hollow of our own eternity.
. . .
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