The Celestial Labor of Remaining Human

Mercury begins walking backward, and no one in the

office hears the machinery reverse inside me,

no one notices language loosening from its hinges,

consciousness misplacing its keys, becoming a corridor

whose doors open into other corridors until even the

simplest question requires me to travel miles through

myself before I can answer with something ordinary.

I arrive each morning dressed like a man who slept,

smiling like a man whose mind has remained inside his

skull, greeting everyone with the practiced warmth of

someone who has made a profession of being available,

while somewhere beneath my ribs an entire building is

being carried from one foundation to another, floor by

floor, every beam grinding against my skeleton, every

window rattling with a grief that has not yet learned what

it is grieving.

When I say I come home and sit in silence, people

imagine peace.

They imagine the lamp glowing gently beside me, the

comfort of solitude, perhaps music turned low while I

recover from an ordinary day, but they do not see me

lowering myself into the room as though I have been

wounded somewhere no physician could examine.

They do not understand that silence is not always serenity;

sometimes it is the final structure left standing

between the world and the scream that has spent eight

hours pressing its face against mine.

Sometimes I sit because if I move too quickly, everything

I have contained may recognize the doorway and rush

through it.

There are evenings when crying waits behind my eyes

with the patience of an animal that knows the gate will

eventually weaken,

when my throat becomes a locked chapel filled with

voices, each one begging to be the first confession, yet I

remain seated, staring forward, because even sorrow

requires coordination and I have spent the day using every

available muscle to appear unharmed.

My face gives me away only when the suffering grows

tired of being mannerly, when it climbs toward the surface

and sharpens my expression into something ravenous,

as though hunger itself has borrowed my features, as

though I have not eaten in centuries and the only

nourishment capable of reaching me would be the

permission to collapse without anyone asking me to

explain the ruins.

Then comes the new moon, dark and concealed, and my

body recognizes it before I remember to look upward.

Something subterranean opens its eyes.

The unseen begins moving furniture through the

chambers of my mind, dragging old memories from their

resting places, uncovering desires I buried because they

demanded more life than I believed I was allowed to

possess.

I become a house visited by everything that only travels at

night, and still, by morning, I must fasten my name

around my neck, enter the world, answer emails, resolve

conflict, guide the uncertain, and translate my private

apocalypse into excellent customer service.

The full moon is less discreet.

It enters like an interrogation lamp, illuminating every

bruise I have successfully hidden from myself, enlarging

each emotion until it develops weather, gravity, claws.

Sleep becomes a country that refuses my passport, and I

lie awake while my nervous system patrols the border

between revelation and exhaustion, receiving

transmissions from some immense and wordless distance.

By sunrise I have survived an entire celestial trial, yet I

stand before others as though nothing occurred, offering

instruction, encouragement, patience, even laughter, while

my spirit remains in the witness box answering questions

the day will never know to ask.

And there are seasons when it is not one planet, one

moon, one retrograde, but the whole universe appearing to

adjust its architecture at once,

every orbit turning a different lock, every transit touching

some hidden wire, every cosmic motion translating itself

through my sleep, my appetite, my speech, my temper,

my longing, my ability to remain inside a room without

feeling that the room has somehow entered me.

The sky rearranges its kingdoms, and I become the

disputed territory.

I am expected to continue as though eternity has not

placed both hands inside my chest and begun searching

for something it refuses to acknowledge.

Yet I am a man of the people, which means I have learned

the sacred violence of remaining present.

I have learned how to carry revelation beneath a

courteous expression, how to stand at the edge of my own

undoing and ask another person how their morning has

been.

I know how to make someone feel safe while creation

itself is turning me inside out, how to become a lantern

for people who never consider that the flame may also be

burning the vessel that holds it.

They bring me their confusion, their grief, their difficult

beginnings, and I meet them there because something in

me has always understood that service is not merely what

I do; it is the costume I wear while surviving what no one

can see.

There is performance in this, although it is not falsehood.

The smile is real, but so is the scream beneath it.

The compassion is real, but so is the part of me that wants

to fall to the floor and become unable, unknown,

unneeded.

I am not pretending to care; I am caring while wounded,

giving while divided, standing while some invisible force

repeatedly asks whether I understand how easily a man

can become a monument to his own endurance.

Perhaps that is why my exhaustion appears insignificant

when spoken plainly.

“I sit in silence” cannot contain the architecture of it.

It does not explain that I have been holding up internal

ceilings all day, that every conversation has required me

to keep debris from falling through my mouth, that my

quiet is the sound of hundreds of emergency workers

searching through the wreckage for a living version of

me.

It does not explain that I am often the survivor and the

disaster, the rescuer and the body beneath the stone.

So let me say it correctly.

When Mercury turns backward, I become a language

trying not to fracture in public.

When the moon disappears, I descend into the rooms that

daylight keeps locked.

When the moon becomes full, every hidden thing

demands a face, a name, a hearing.

When the planets change their positions and the universe

shifts its immeasurable weight, I feel the movement as

though creation has mistaken my body for one of its instruments

and begun playing frequencies no human

structure was designed to sustain.

Still, I report to work.

Still, I answer when called.

Still, I make space for the frightened, the confused, the

newly arrived, the people whose uncertainty requires

someone steady enough to stand beside them.

They see a man performing his duties, while inside him

towers bend, oceans climb stairwells, moons scrape

against latched doors, and every unshed tear gathers with

the force of a flood that has been commanded to remain

professional.

This is the part no horoscope explains.

Not merely that the heavens affect me, but that I must

continue belonging to the world while they do.

That I must be useful while undergoing transformation,

articulate while language rebels, gentle while every nerve

feels summoned before some imperceptible tribunal.

That I must keep offering humanity a place to rest while

searching desperately for somewhere within myself that

has not already been occupied by the sky.

And when I finally return home, close the door, remove

the clothing that helped me resemble stability, and lower

myself into silence,

understand that I am not doing nothing.

I am keeping the building from collapsing.I am standing

between the scream and the walls.

I am waiting for the universe to finish passing through me

without taking the man everyone is expecting to see

tomorrow.