The Shift

The shift is never sudden, but it always feels that way. One moment the world is too bright, too sharp, too loud — the next, the light is gone. Not dimmed. Gone. As if someone has pulled the sun out of the sky and left the atmosphere hollow.

It doesn’t feel like falling into darkness.

It feels like the brightness has been taken.

The first sensation is the absence of light inside my own mind. The spark behind the eyes — the one that ignited the ascent, fueled the altitude, fractured into brilliance — extinguishes without ceremony. No flicker. No fade. Just a quiet, internal blackout.

The world doesn’t go dark.

I do.

Colors flatten.

Edges soften.

Sound loses its clarity.

The air thickens.

It’s not sensory overload anymore.

It’s sensory muting.

The brightness that once felt unbearable now feels impossible to remember. The urgency evaporates. The momentum collapses. The internal narration that once raced now drags, heavy and slow, like trying to think underwater.

This is the moment where the weather changes — not outside, but inside the skull.

The body feels it first.

The chest tightens.

The limbs grow heavy.

The breath sinks lower, slower, deeper.

The muscles that once buzzed with energy now ache with depletion. The posture collapses inward. The spine curves. The shoulders drop. The body folds around the absence of light.

Then comes the emotional dimming — the quiet, creeping sense that something essential has slipped out of reach. Not hope. Not joy. Something more fundamental: capacity.

Capacity to move.

Capacity to think.

Capacity to care.

Capacity to rise.

The brightness had been unsustainable, but it had been something.

The dark is not something.

It is the absence of something.

This is the weather shift:

the moment the sky inside me changes seasons.

The upward weather ends.

The downward weather begins.

The light collapses.

The weight arrives.

And with it, the Ground.