Sediment

Where the canyon cuts deep you can read centuries like a book left open— ochre, rust, pale grey, each band a different silence pressed into stone. We carry our own strata. The argument that calcified into a habit of quiet. The summer that turned amber and sank below the rest. Geologists call it unconformity— where time goes missing, two eras pressed together, nothing between them but the evidence of absence. To hold a piece of limestone is to hold the sea floor's residue, shells dissolved into themselves, the whole weight of accumulation fitting in one palm.