Exponential Growth

I. Fold, crease, unfold, sheets of paper thin as possibility, a crisp white plea to gravity. Forty-five times, a cosmic origami building bridges from table to the moon. The mind dreams, unfurls dimensions from the flatness, each fold a petition of ascension. But reality, that quiet artisan, intervenes. Seven, eight, perhaps nine folds— the paper resists, its fibers tightening, a rebellion against a lunar destiny. The geometry of dreams collapses into the physics of limitation, a negotiation between ambition and restraint. II. Sated with the hunger of excess, we feast at counters where gluttony is a ritual, a rhapsody of indulgence. Plates piled high, offerings to the insatiable gods of appetite, mouths moving in a tempo of ingestion. Like a paper's rebellion against too much folding, the body, too, whispers its limits. Sometimes in tears, sometimes in laughter, but always in inevitability, the stomach's silent protest, a wall that even the voracious cannot breach. Eruption looms, a volcanic protest, or else the creeping weight, its own gravity pulling the body to a corporeal moon. III. From paper to body, from the moon to the food, all are tethered by the finite, implacable laws governing a universe of possibility. Fold and unfold, feast and decline, the trajectory of excess tempered by the ever-present specter of consequence.