Stones Remember

The riverbed holds its breath between floods, each stone smooth as a forgetting, each pebble a year compressed to silence. Water will return. It always does.

What the mountains know in their long sleep— that pressure is just patience, that edges dull to character, that breaking is another word for becoming.

The walls we build from these patient rocks stand longer than our names, longer than the stories we whisper against them. They have heard worse things than our doubts.

In the dust of a quarried cliff face, in the gravel scattered across a path, in every foundation that holds us— the ancient work of standing still.

This is the grammar of stones: no hurry, no apology, just the steady arithmetic of time turning all our sharpness into smoothness.