What the Body Learns Last

The air does not belong to you. It passes through your chest the way people do, without asking, without apology. Some days it feels clean. Other days it carries dust, the trace of something already gone. You keep breathing anyway. Not because you understand it, just because your body won’t stop. Rain falls without choosing. It touches what you love and what you avoid the same way. You stand in it thinking of what you want back. The water soaks through anyway. You open your hands. You close them. It changes nothing. The sun here is rarely gentle. It dries what you wanted to keep soft, sharpens what you thought time would blur. The light doesn’t care. It just stays. And you stay in it too, like someone who forgot where the shade was and didn’t bother looking again. The earth holds what you drop into it. Not forever. Not in the way you imagined. Roots take what they need. Trees grow around what they cannot move. The ground doesn’t resist. It just keeps going, slowly, like it already agreed to something you’re still fighting. And somewhere in all of it, in the dust, in the rain, in the heat that doesn’t let go, something stays. Not in your hands. Not in anything you can keep. You only notice it when you stop trying. Something like love, maybe. Quiet. Still there.