Night Has a Different Kind of Gravity

Night has a different kind of gravity.
It presses against the ribs, pulls thought downward, tilts the floorboards until even silence begins to slide.

I woke in the middle of that gravity, the house leaning around me like a ship. The walls breathed. The ceiling lowered. Outside, the trees bent their crowns to listen.

I tried to walk across the room but my feet sank into the carpet as if it were soil, as if roots were tugging me back.

The window was a black mirror, filled not with my reflection but with the faces of those who had lived here before me—pale, silent, watching.

The night air tasted of iron and memory.

Every step forward collapsed into another story: the girl who left through the back door and never returned; the mother who kept her grief in jars beneath the floorboards; the brother who carved his name into the lintel as though he could keep himself from vanishing.

I wanted to turn on a light, but the switch dissolved beneath my hand. The darkness would not release me.

I understood then: night has its own gravity, and it does not let go.

It drags the body inward, down past the marrow, down past the hidden rooms where words rot in the walls.

But at the bottom of that pull, where even breath refused to rise, I found a single star. Small, trembling, but alive.

I held it in my hands until the floor steadied, until the walls remembered themselves, until the house stood upright again.

By dawn, the star was gone.

But its afterglow lingered in my skin, a reminder that even in the heaviest gravity, something waits to be lifted.

There is a light within waiting to be found.