The Dissolving Hour

There is a country with no borders on the map, where the face you were assembling comes apart like smoke, and the sentence you were finishing drops its last word into dark water. The mind floats there, unmoored, still warm from the logic of the body, watching the rooms rearrange themselves— a door where no door was, the stairs descending somewhere new. What speaks in that country has no mouth. What moves casts no shadow. You are still reaching for the cup when morning finds you empty-handed. And yet something crossed over. Some fact absorbed without knowing, some grief set down like a stone in a different place than where you found it— lighter, strangely, and no longer yours.