Category: Prose
Theme: Existence, and devotion to the present moment as the only enduring act of wonder.
There are faces that behave like small catastrophes of light—less anatomy than a misfired constellation that has stumbled into our sightline. To stand before one is to inherit a reckoning: the world arranges itself around that glance, as if the axis of hours had tilted to make room; and yet the same impression carries its own indictment, because radiance always arrives with a built-in deadline. It combusts; what remains is an after-image smeared across the retina, a thin varnish that peels away when you least expect it.
Dreams visit with the bluntness of excavators—unearthing entire architectures of significance and then, without ceremony, folding them into nothing. They are not absences rather deliberate erasures, leaving behind only the topology of feeling: ridges of astonishment, chasms of deprivation. We try to arrest them with crude tools of habit—naming, photographing, repeating—but those measures only ritualize the disappearance; the more elaborate the shrine, the more exact the way its contents dissolve.
We carry an implicit knowledge of disintegration, yet live as if denial were a necessary craft. Youth builds contraptions of confidence—small altars of daily custom—to claim immunity from entropy. Lying beneath the sun and enumerating the world's fragile proofs is not a childish superstition but a tactical rebellion: to perceive in full is to defy the slow arithmetic of obliteration. Perception becomes an ethical act, a refusal to allow the world’s particulars to be silted over by time.
Night sometimes loosens the seams between moments; the house grows porous, and sound migrates like a fugitive. They are remnants of the living left adrift—unfinished phrases and unclaimed gestures that resurface without an addressee, reverberating with unsettling persistence. Music in such an hour behaves less like composition than like testimony, arriving with the blunt insistence of something that remembers a chronology we no longer honor.
I once imagined the body as a readable chart, its planes and markers yielding a reliable geography of the interior. That arrogance was my first lesson. Language is rarely a door; it is an amplifying room that distorts the source. I pursued the inflection of another’s voice as if it were a cartographic clue, and neglected the emptiness it often encircled. Intimacy, I learned, is less an acquisition than a ledger—entries that depreciate, handwriting that blurs beneath the faint shower of dissolution.
Even annihilation is but a redistribution—the body rendered into particles, scattered into an indifferent weather that neither mourns nor remembers, rather than a clean severance. If permanence reveals itself as myth, then fidelity to the present moment becomes the only possible devotion. Such knowledge could ossify into despair, yet more often it ripens into a strange and unbidden generosity. Laughter, then, is not mere mirth but a subversive economy—an investment in astonishment that refuses to compound into cynicism.
To meet again—if that verb can mean anything beyond hopeful grammar—would not be a tidy reconciliation but a reiterated surprise: two anomalies intersecting once more in a universe still stubbornly hospitable to wonder. The miracle is not continuity but recurrence—the improbable fact that anything at all survives long enough to be astonished.
Published By: Jigger Von Malenab.
Published: October 2, 2025
Time: 6:49 pm
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