Endurance

You are alive. That is the fact.
Not chosen, not spared for any reason that would satisfy you.
Others are gone. The ground took them without argument.
You remain, breathing the same air that moved through their lungs,
now emptied.

Do not ask which power withheld you from the dark.
There is no answer there.
The hills do not explain themselves,
nor the sea why it takes one body and leaves another
rocking in the shallows.

You have seen the rooms go silent.
Chairs stand where they were left.
A cup, half-rinsed, holds the print of a mouth
that will not return.
This is how the world continues:
by subtraction, without ceremony.

Once there was noise, and the disorder of living—
voices crossing, hands reaching,
the small careless feasts of ordinary days.
You believed, then, in some continuity,
as if warmth might argue with time.

It does not.

Now the animals move through the same fields.
Wind crosses the same distances.
Light falls, impartial, on stone and bone alike.
Nothing in it inclines toward you,
nothing turns away.

You feel this as a wound
because you are made to feel—
a brief arrangement of nerves
that calls itself a self
and resists dispersal.

But the arrangement will loosen.
It always does.

Still, something in you refuses the conclusion.
Not hope. Not faith.
A tension, perhaps—
like a root holding in dry soil,
taking what it can from a depth that does not answer.

Call it endurance if you need a word.

It does not redeem.
It does not explain.
It persists.

And from it, sometimes,
a shape is made—
a line of words,
a sound carried a little way into the air,
before it fades.

That is enough.

Not because it heals anything,
but because it exists
where nothing was required to exist at all.