The universe, however—no matter how boundless it appears—runs by laws and precision older than desire. It does not interrupt to correct you. It allows your forgetting. It allows your entitlement. It allows you to behave as if what was given were owed.
Until it does not.
The allotment runs out. It always does.
There is no appeal. No stay of sentence. Only the quiet fact that the contract was signed long ago, in invisible ink, at the moment of first breath. The body does not believe in endings. The heart does not know how to stop reaching for what is gone. The breath you never counted becomes something you notice only in its absence. The shape that once filled space withdraws, leaving behind the unmistakable outline of where a life had been.
You keep reaching for what is no longer there, not because you misunderstand reality, but because your body has not yet been taught the law it has always lived under.
–Continued–Page 3