After Certainty

I walked once where everything agreed,
or seemed to.
The light fell cleanly on what I believed.
Words followed easily.
I spoke them as if they had weight.

It is possible
I mistook ease for truth.

Nothing announced the change.
No voice, no sign.
Only a small resistance
in things I had already said.

A hesitation.

I began to notice it in others first.
A phrase too certain.
A laughter that closed rather than opened.
A silence where something should have answered.

Then in myself.

I found I could not repeat
what I had said before
without hearing it
as if spoken by someone else.

Not false, exactly.
But no longer mine.

There was a moment
I might have turned back.
Left it there.
Let the surface hold.

Instead, I stayed with it.

This is not courage.
Not clarity.

More like standing
when sitting would have been easier.

Since then, the language has thinned.
What I say feels provisional.
Even the act of saying it.

I do not know
what has replaced what was lost.

There is less comfort in agreement.
More space, perhaps,
but not one I can name.

I speak now
and listen at the same time,
waiting to hear
if it holds.

It does not always.

And still, I go on speaking.

Not because I am sure,
but because silence
does not answer either.

If there is a rightness in this,
it has not declared itself.

If there is a cost,
it is ongoing.

And the question remains,
not loud,
but present:

what have I chosen,
and what has that choice
chosen in me?