The air still moves

The air shifts,
as if the weight of a soul
moving through it
leaves ripples no one else feels.

Somewhere, a hand holds its first breath,
and elsewhere,
a chest gives up its last.
The balance tips,
silent, unnoticed,
but the world
is never quite the same.

I think of the days
that stretched so wide
I thought they would never end—
how they folded themselves
like paper cranes
until I couldn’t see
their beginnings.
How I disappeared into them,
and when I emerged,
I wore someone else’s skin.

It is strange to live
as a stranger to the lives I’ve lived,
to see their shapes
through the telescope of memory,
so close, so distant,
their edges smudged
by the passing of time.

When my turn comes,
who will carry my name?
Who will lay it down gently,
and who will let it fall?
Will anyone breathe easier
with my absence?
And does it matter
if the air still moves
when I am gone?

I do not know.
But I know this:
every moment we live
we become a part
of the vast, trembling thread
woven by hands we cannot see.
And every moment,
someone else begins
the journey of forgetting
and being forgotten.

It is not cruel,
this endless shift.
It simply is.