The Archipelagos of Dust

A thin filament of rusted light stretches across the uneven floorboards, catching motes of ancient silence as they drift, untethered and aimless, through the heavy afternoon air.

They are constellations of the forgotten, shed skin of seasons we failed to map, settling into the quiet corners where shadows wait to gather them back into the earth’s deep fold.

We breathe them in, this fractured geography, every inhalation an inheritance of lost things, tasting the phantom sweetness of rain that fell before our hands ever learned the slow, stubborn work of holding on.