🪜🪞 Altitude Is a Costume 🪞🪜

 🪜🪞 Altitude Is a Costume 🪞🪜

I’m depressed, thrilled about it—my joy wears a lab coat and smells like burnt incense and chalk dust.
I don’t swing fists at towers anymore.
I tap the screws at ankle-height
and listen.

Power hates being measured in centimeters.
It prefers mythic units—
destiny per capita, authority squared,
a voice so loud it mistakes echo for consensus.

So I stop looking up.
I inventory the floor.
I count the milk crates,
the borrowed verbs,
the outsourced certainty stapled to ceremonial grammar.
Nothing collapses dramatically.
It shortens.

The villain starts growing adjectives.
This is how you know the lift failed.

I don’t call them evil.
I reduce their mass.
I ask where the load-bearing lie is hiding,
what fantasy is doing the heavy lifting,
which unpaid illusion is working overtime
so the crown doesn’t slip.

Mockery is too generous.
Outrage is anabolic.
I use subtraction.
I turn spotlights into receipts.
I leave silence where applause was supposed to go
and watch paranoia try to self-soothe
by inflating itself like a lung with no oxygen.

They want an enemy above them.
They get a janitor below,
quietly removing the ladder,
one rung at a time,
until “height” becomes a rumor
and authority forgets how it ever got off the ground.

No punch.
No sermon.
No martyrdom cosplay.
Just gravity,
patient and unpaid,
collecting its debt.

Physics breadcrumb, cold and clean: escape velocity isn’t about strength or virtue—fail to move sideways fast enough, and falling isn’t punishment, it’s accounting.