The Sky Took Them

You arrive somewhere between arrivals and forgetting —
an airport without signage,
a room without corners.

They’re waiting for you.
Not with greetings, but with urgency.
No names are exchanged, only glances
that seem to say: You know why you’re here.

You’re moved — not guided —
through a building that breathes like a lung.
Its walls pulse faintly,
as if remembering something.

In a dim chamber, a screen flickers.
It shows a city.
Still. Suspended.
Above it: thousands of balloons, pale and pulsing,
rising in silence.

From each balloon trails a thread.
The children are being lifted.
Softly, eerily — as if consenting
to be untethered from the earth.

You’re told: This is the problem.
But no one says how it began.
No one speaks of where they go.
Only that they vanish,
and the city doesn’t speak of it.

You are here to understand.
Not to solve.
Not to comfort.
Only to see.

The others watch you with breathless waiting,
but you feel the question twisting in your ribs:
Why me?

And then the sound —
not of laughter or crying,
but the faint hush of silk threads lifting what can’t be held.

The room turns dimmer,
thick with the scent of iron and ash.
You recall something ancient —
a half-remembered rite,
a childhood drawing,
a myth never told aloud.

They ask you again.
What will you do?

You feel your mouth open.

But what you say —
or don’t —
disperses into the air
like powder.

And then—
just movement.
Like the edge of a curtain shifting.
Or the silence that comes
when the dream decides not to end.

Notitia is a practice of attending to what lingers beneath the surface. These writings unfold as quiet invitations — not to explain, but to feel more deeply. Stay with what resists clarity.