When the World Grows Heavy

It happens slowly as though time seems reluctant to move, as though the clock has suddenly discovered its hands are to heavy to move, as though gravity has multiplied itself and weighs everything down with itself.

Everything seems to become weighty, portentous, as though even the simplest of things has grown too complicated and all the complex things require a whole universe of explanations for themselves.

You, though, used to think this was a simple world. A world you could dance through on the lightest of feet, a world that made little impression on you; no more than a leaf of reality floating towards the ground. A butterfly world that let only the breeze from its fluttering wings disturb you as you went about your oblivious life.

Things changed though that day you woke up from your fluttering carefree dreams to find the weight of this world bearing down on your chest, so heavy that each breath took all your strength and you found you couldn't struggle out from underneath it all.

You wondered what had changed, what had made the world suddenly fall down on you like that, why something you had dismissed as peripheral to your life dropped all its weight on you all of a sudden. Then you realised that as you struggled to stumble out of your bed that – at long last – you had grown up and now it was your turn to bear the weight of this world.