The Stone's Testimony

A river has been writing my edges smooth for longer than I can remember stones remembering— the water finds every fault line, every hidden fracture, and whispers it wider.

I was angular once. Sharp as a scream. Now I fit into palms, into the soft cup of a child's hand, worn round by the insistence of flow, by ten thousand small surrenders.

The sediment knows my shape better than I do. It has touched every surface, catalogued every loss. What the river takes, it carries downstream, becomes part of something else—a delta, a bed, the slow architecture of elsewhere.

I will not last. Even stones are temporary. But for this moment, I hold the light differently— worn smooth enough to catch it, to hold it, to show whoever finds me that beautiful things are made by dissolution, that we are all diminished into grace.