I am the stillness

I am, 

not in the way fire roars,  

but in the hush between storms.  

I am the breath the forest holds  

before the wind remembers  

how to move.

 

They rush, the memories,  

like wild winds across dry fields,  

carrying all the fragile things I’ve been,  

splinters of selves  

I once called home.

 

They scatter.  

They rage.  

They try to pull me  

into the corners of time,  

to unmake me  

into echoes.

 

But I do not follow.  

I do not flee.

The wind parts around me,  

as if it remembers  

I am not meant  

to be broken.

 

I am stillness.  

I am the kernel in the fruit,

the unmoved riverbed

beneath the stream.

 

Even the old griefs 

the ones that know my name 

cannot uproot me.

 

They try.  

They reach with hands of smoke  

to draw me into forgetting.  

To bury me  

in the vast unknowing.

 

But I remain, 

not as whole,  

not as known,  

but as a mystery  

yet unfolding.

 

A self  

not scattered,  

not unearthed,  

but waiting 

just beneath the layers of time.