Oobe (2024)

I looked back.

There is a version of me still rising. Still passing the bride, the firefighter, the man with the tie. Still heading for the dark between stars.

That’s the part no one tells you: the silence. Down in the body, there’s always a hum—blood, digestion, the grind of molars. Up here, pure acoustic zero. I could have shouted her name until the walls bled sound. Nothing. I was a ghost in the only house I’d ever known. I looked back

The tether yanked.

They hung in the thermosphere like a school of slow fish—fragments of people, each one a thin negative of a life. A firefighter still wearing his helmet. A bride whose veil trailed into nothing. A man in a business suit, tie flapping in solar wind. None of them spoke. But I heard them anyway. Still heading for the dark between stars

Now I’m an adult with a mortgage and a pill for my thyroid. I stand in grocery lines. I return library books. I attend meetings where we discuss “synergy.” And every few months, without warning, I’ll be washing dishes or sitting at a red light, and the floor will go soft. My hands will look like someone else’s hands. And I’ll remember:

I fell through every layer, screaming without a throat, and slammed back into myself so hard I bit my tongue. Blood on the pillow. My mother never stopped knitting. The fever broke an hour later. Up here, pure acoustic zero

Then the tether snapped.