We lean expectantly into what hasn’t yet arrived,

the way a wave begins its curl before the collapse,

and all our plans are neat paper boats set on waters

we cannot name—the future, that foggy country

far and near without a flag and not quite home,

where even cultures who hold no word for it

still feel the tug of seasons turning in the bone,

the child becoming elder in the slow dissolve

of days, and Heidegger knew this as well:

that possibility constrains as much as it releases,

each door opened, closes seven others down the hall

of what we might have been, and so, we carry our

unlived lives like shadows, contaminated, walking with

us half a step behind with hot breath, while the present,

that fragile thin membrane, shivers like a bubble and is

gone before the tongue can pop it out of existence,

and the future we so carefully constructed falls

into the past like wintered leaves into a river after rain,

rushing, ever rushing, towards us in a torment,

becoming memory before it was ever fully here,

and still we reach, still we lean, still we contemplate,

still, we name the unnameable horizon of nothingness

where our deaths wait patient as grandmothers,

where our children’s children bloom in gardens

we will never see, and isn’t this the human

way—to be forever thrown to a certain place

that has already gone, to feel the future not as distance

but as presence, intimate as breath on your face,

as the next beat of the heart that assumes,

with beautiful audacity, there will be another.

 

26/11/2025