Gravity

Postcards from Baguio City

It’s not the weight of your burden that pulls you down, but the gravity of the city that keeps us all bound to the ground, looking up from time to time for a chance to see a piece of the sky in between the crevices of our concrete-wrapped reality.

You take a small leap over a puddle of rainwater—once a cloud beyond your reach, now a filthy reflection of whatever passes over—and land on steady footing and wobbly spirit. You join a mass of silhouettes crossing the avenue of nothing new and wish you knew a way to fool and overrule this cruel, feudal gravitational pull.

You run every single time you get a chance, trying to hit the city’s escape velocity only to run out of breath on the verge. You climb every mountain you can, struggling against the mighty pull of the city, only to come back down to your asphalt origins.

Who are you fooling? Even time bends to the will of gravity.

You were told to age knowing better—that the city is your inevitable singularity.

So, by all means, run your fastest, jump your highest, and climb the tallest mountains if it helps you breathe.

But don’t resist the descent. Embrace the fall. Come back down, and if possible, go down deeper—deep into the core, into your singularity.

And in that instance, remember that all laws made by humans—the long and winding equations that mean to explain our existence—all break down to mean completely nothing in the singularity. Here is the end of gravity, where all reality is theory, and all theory is reality.

Here, your burden is a friend, guiding you through the weightlessness of being—the force that helps you punch a hole through the end of all things and into a new existence—

A big bang unfolding—bound by no city, bound by no sky—mother to all galaxies, spewing stars that brighten up the darkest of our earthly nights.