you are in a cavern (salvaged from old notes)

You are in a cavern.* Before you stretches a network of tunnels, branching infinitely. There is no light save for that emanating from you. You look back: almost predictably, it has caved over, but the spaces between boulders are just wide enough for you to peer through. You peek, sigh, and move on.

You notice that with every hundred or so steps you take, there is a rumbling sound behind you. Each one is the sound of the same material crashing down, but with a variety of distinct nuances in timeline, tempo, and volume: one sounds like a tunnel you had long considered traversing, but thought the better of at the last second; another, much closer, sounds like one you would have wanted to walk tomorrow.

*How you got in is of no moment; such thoughts are the luxury of philosophers, and the exigencies of being in a cavern afford nothing in the way of philosophy.

run

I am always exhausted from dreams. In them, I am always running. Always barefoot, soles scraping against concrete–the setting is always some urban footnote, some memory of corporate drudgery, claustrophobia of brutalist walls, brutal spaces–the effort inscribing itself on every part of my body: panting, sweating, heart beating as desperation. I have never experienced looking back; my gaze is always forward: charging, chasing something to which my soul feels entitled.

I never know what it is; I only know that, in all these years, I have never reached it.