Not Staying.

We learned to count because we could not learn to stay.

The ground gives way without warning.
It simply withdraws.

A spring sky darkens, and the wind from the northwest arrives like the breath of something older than fear—something that remembers us better than we remember ourselves. I tell myself this shaking is familiar—that I have known it before, that it has passed through me in other seasons and left me standing. But reassurance is a fragile architecture. Anxiety arrives unbidden, loosening belief, thinning conviction, erasing the quiet assurances I once mistook for permanence. What once held me steady disappears, and I am left kneeling among the scattered pieces of myself, unsure which fragments still belong.

Yet erasure is never complete. Something ungovernable endures—a feral instinct to persist, pulsing quietly beneath the wreckage. In the intervals between panic and forgetting, I count: time, progress, accumulation. We are forever trying to pull order from turbulence, to bargain with chaos using routines and metrics. We believe that if we measure enough, predict enough, nothing will surprise us again. We count because we mistake measurement for meaning. But order, once interrogated, reveals its brittleness. Patterns fray. Figures lose authority. The ground slips again.

We trust what can be computed. We trust what repeats. We trust what appears stable—as though these things might hold the world in place, as though certainty could be engineered. And when it fails, we call it betrayal, though the fault was always ours. Time shifts. Meaning mutates. Context dissolves. What once made sense unravels into riddles. Life exceeds calculation not because it is cruel, but because it is indifferent to our need for closure.

This is how we become strangers to ourselves. We move through days half-awake, careful not to disturb the ache we carry like a second spine. Shame gathers where words should be. Loss leaves us motionless, suspended between what was and what can no longer be retrieved. Each trial arrives as if unprecedented, demanding fresh endurance from bodies already exhausted. Fear takes up residence. Anxiety learns the contours of our faces. Even when we speak, the words feel futile—dropping into silence, absorbed before they can echo.

Nothing remains untouched. What we believed durable proves provisional. Keepsakes—what we saved, guarded, called ours—slip quietly out of reach. Certainties erode. We drift, not aimlessly but without authorship, like caravans tracing invisible routes, like debris surrendering to current. Morning arrives regardless. To wake feels like defiance, like trespass. And yet we continue—guided by habit, by breath, by the small rituals that keep us tethered: inhale, exhale, again, again, until the rhythm finally stops. This is the truth we circle but refuse to name: the end is the only certainty we postpone accepting. The end is not revelation—it is the thought we cannot bear to complete.