Escape

Meks McClure · April 07, 2026

Tell me Did you think that time would close it? That the wound would gather itself like a river mouth filling with silt until the water forgot it had ever been open? It doesn't. Loss is a black hole pressed onto the white page of your precious, terrified life so wide there is no margin left, no room for even your name. Escape feels like the only way. You cannot heal the hole. But you can build around it. The crow knows. She carries bright things a button an earring a key to place in the dark like small, deliberate stars. A sunset so low and so gold for a moment you forget yourself. An unremarkable Tuesday except for the scent of fresh baked bread. A friend shaking beside you with laughter at nothing and everything. Gather them. Hoard them. Be greedy. Be chaotic. Let your collection be wild and unruly as the universe itself. These are not big moments. Nobody will write them down in the history books. They are small and ordinary as pennies. And this is what you must choose. You can collect the pennies of your pain drop them one by one into the buckets on the yoke across your shoulders until the weight brings you to your knees on a road going nowhere. Or you can gather the bright ordinary and build your own messy, improbable mountain to climb hand over hand sparkle by sparkle up and out of the dark. The hole does not shrink. The page grows. New color, new ink, new life layered around that dark dot until it's small enough to carry without kneeling. The glimmers do not erase grief. They give you the one thing you need when you want nothing more than to escape the night. Hope which is not a promise but a direction a leaning of the self into tomorrow. And the crow is already flying with something shining in her beak.