The Alphabet of Water

Water has no grammar, only patience— carving the same sentence into stone for ten thousand years until the meaning finally arrives, worn smooth as a river stone, unreadable.

I've watched the alphabet dissolve in cupped palms, each letter a goodbye we didn't mean to speak. The pen hesitates where the paper thins, where water has already written.

A valley remembers every raindrop before the rain forgets itself in air. The canyon keeps better records than we do, keeping no records at all, just the shape of what was taken.

Speech is the sound of forgetting— we speak to lose the silence that knew us. But stone knows how to listen the way water teaches it, by wearing through every word we ever said.

There is a language in small things: dust settling, leaves turning their pale backs, the way a river moves through its own body like a thought thinking itself, and we are just the pauses between sentences.