Perception – Am I Coming or Going?

Perception – Am I Coming or Going?

The question slides between the eyelids of a morning,
a breath caught in the hinge of a half‑opened door.
I stand at the edge of a world that shimmers,
its surface rippling with every glance—
a lake that remembers the stones we toss in,
but forgets the stones that never fell.

Am I coming?
The tide of sight rolls in, a tide of sound, a tide of scent—
each wave a promise that the world is arriving anew,
that the first note of a song is already humming inside my ribs,
that the scent of rain is a whisper that has already touched my skin.

Or am I going?
The shadows lengthen, pulling the edges of my awareness
toward the quiet interior where thoughts dissolve like mist.
I feel the retreat of colors, the soft unthreading of language,
the slow un‑spooling of the thread that once tied me to a moment.

Between these two currents, perception hovers—
a restless pilgrim with no map, only a compass that spins.
It arrives on the tip of a fingertip, a sudden chill,
and departs on the sigh of a closed eye.

I am both the candle that lights the room
and the darkness that swallows its flame.
I am the echo that follows a word,
and the silence that precedes the word’s birth.

So I ask again, without answer, in the mirror of my own gaze:

Perception—am I coming or going?

Perhaps the truth lies not in the direction,
but in the motion itself: the endless turning
of a wheel that never knows where its rim ends,
where its hub begins.
And in that turning, we are forever arriving,
forever departing—always, forever now.