Fall Off the Edge

If I think about it hard enough, I can touch the edge of the world.

It’s not a concrete thing that you travel to. It’s not a place where people set up tourist traps with binoculars that let you look into the other side of your reality. It’s not proof of another existence we should be living.

It’s liquid. With a consistency of oil, it reflects the life of the world when you dip your hand in. It coats your arm, and dribbles against gravity back up into the atmosphere, violet and red swirls of another day gleaming so slightly inside it.

It’s painful. The sensation of blood trickles up your arm instead of the oil of the edge. Every droplet that falls up into the sky is a piece of you gone with it.

It’s numbing.

And if I think about it hard enough I can reach in. I can prick the edge of my fingertips and smell the copper scent of that other side. I can submerge my hand, slipping it through the silver. I can step through, a fire flowing through my body, and shooting through the tips of my fingers and the ends of my hair.

I can submerge myself in the edge of the world.

I can disappear.

I can’t come back.