Specifically, downhill.

I’m running down a slope laden with thorns that prick my bare ankles at every given opportunity. Though I’m certain there are other, more distinct and easily travelled paths than those we’ve obtained.

Like boulders unsettled from the crest, we each take turns throwing our bodies towards an unpredictable decline, anticipating that the plunge will bless us with just enough momentum to make it through to the finish. I’m left unable to resist offering my flesh into the gaping mouths of nettles, innocently flocking their depraved abilities in abundant herds. Every little gesture gives them one more chance to bite, pierce, and persecute my already aggravated limbs, compounded by the brute force I had endured whilst on the initial fall.

After some time, we ceased to recognise how much the pain enveloped us; the sensation of numbness comes to remedy your wounds, and you cannot help but feel as if you need to be punctured all over once more, as the legend goes. Time seems to pass with lesser velocity than it has ever been able to achieve before. Soon enough, I’m rekindled with a lost sight, the memory of several other tumbling cadavers around me, either succumbing or prospering in their injuries.

When all of this is over, you’ll wonder if our capabilities allow us to recount our tales over conversation once we’ve all reached the bottom. Though while some are left paralysed in a death curl, powerless to convey their catastrophic bliss, others brushing it off in hysterics, racing manically back to the peak just to commune with what they felt again, we’re all anchored to cycles we couldn’t understand to crave until now.

It returns back to me. The decline is becoming more gradual, and the mass of my body is ceasing its motive to roll and spill.

It all slows down to halt.

I wonder if I’ll be embraced once I’ve opened my eyes.

If you made it to the end, I applaud you for getting through 200-something words of mine. It’s kind of you to read, and it’s (mostly) beneficial for your brain too. Science.

Until the next,