Each beat is borrowed against a balance no one will show us.
Where I live, the year divides itself in two moods rather than four seasons: a relentless, sweatless heat and abrupt, gray spells of rain that feel almost borrowed. One day you bundle up just to haul the trash to the curb; the next you stand in shorts and a T-shirt, blinking into a sun that pretends nothing has changed. The weather here doesn’t ease from one state to another—it flips, as if certainty were never part of the design. You stop expecting continuity. You learn not to trust yesterday as a guide for today. Plans become softer, habits more provisional. Even memory feels less reliable, as though the past, like the sky, can revise itself overnight.
A life is felt before it is counted. We count it obsessively because we sense its impatience. Birthdays, milestones, deadlines—we name them all, as if numbering a life might anchor something already drifting. The Earth can spin for eons. We cannot. Our bodies were never built to endure indefinitely; they promise only a single ending.
Before it is measured in years, life is measured in beats. Each heartbeat repeats what has not yet ended—a continuation that feels certain only because it has not yet failed. We mistake repetition for permanence. We forget that rhythm is not a guarantee, only a condition.
When the heart enters asystole, there is no drama in the event itself. No crescendo. Only the quiet withdrawal of expectation. The future, which had been arriving automatically, stops arriving. What remains is a stillness that asks nothing more of time. The greater shock is not its arrival, but the realization that time was never ours to accumulate. It was passing through us, using our bodies briefly as instruments.
Asystole marks the point where measurement ends. Time releases its hold. From here, there is no returning—the one thing it never pretended to promise. What was given stays what it was—uncertain, unfinished, ungentle.