Money is compensation transmuted
into all that we cannot see.
Time rewarded into numbers.
A conversion so clean
it forgets the hands that made it possible.
This is a strange magic.
Creating from nothing
once the something has already been spent.
—
Hours collapse into symbols.
Breath becomes digits.
The ache in the wrist learns to speak
in a language without sensation.
No pulse survives the translation.
What was lived is flattened,
pressed into a surface smooth enough
to pass between strangers
without explanation.
—
Money remembers effort
only in theory.
It carries no weather.
No fatigue.
No moment where you considered stopping
and did not.
It arrives immaculate,
as though time volunteered itself
and was not taken.
—
We call this reward.
We call this fairness.
As if equivalence were possible
between minutes and meaning.
As if duration could be audited
without loss.
As if the ledger did not quietly erase
everything that refused to be counted.
—
There is something holy in the abstraction.
I admit that.
To pull value out of absence.
To let a week dissolve
and leave behind something portable.
It is alchemy with receipts.
A ritual everyone agrees to perform
so the world continues to function.
—
But nothing disappears.
It only hides.
The time is still gone.
The body still knows.
The number just stands in for it
like a proxy witness
who never saw the event.
—
Money circulates.
Time does not.
One can be recovered,
saved, invested, misplaced.
The other moves forward
and refuses to acknowledge
any argument to the contrary.
—
This is the tension.
I need the number.
I resent the exchange.
I trust the system enough to survive
and doubt it enough to feel diminished by it.
Gratitude and grief
occupying the same account.
—
Money is not evil.
That would be too simple.
It is a spell we keep casting
because the alternative
requires us to look directly
at what living actually costs.
And we are rarely prepared
to pay attention
without abstraction.
