Accumulation

The world keeps functioning. That's the problem.

Something inside this voice begins to slip sideways from everything around her, quietly, in ways that don't present as crisis. She misses her stop. Her hands shake longer than they should. The surface holds. There's nothing to point at.

What she knows, she does. The accumulation is happening below the level where she has language for it, collecting without her consent. She isn't falling apart. The world is just no longer where she left it, and because she has no before to compare it to, she has no name for what's happening.

The guard comes down not as collapse but as fatigue arriving where management used to live.

They called it normal conditions / I let that stand

Still moving. Motion mistaken for being fine. What continuing actually costs arrives not as revelation but as reckoning.