Life happens in the adverbs.
Between arriving and being seen.
Between the kettle and the cup.
Between the thought and the courage to keep it.
Twelve and twelve divide the day
like a ruler held by a shaking hand.
Morning leaks into night imperfectly.
Most of it is called nothing
and spent anyway.
I have always resented the edit.
The way films forgive themselves
for skipping what teaches us how to live.
They cut away from the waiting,
the sitting,
the long-held breath of becoming
that never earns applause.
But this is where we learn our language again.
Not the one spoken,
the one rehearsed in silence.
The grammar of restraint.
The syntax of staying.
Somewhere, someone is praying
without words.
Someone is manifesting quietly,
as if not to startle the future.
Someone is lamenting
into the hollow of their chest
because the room is listening too closely.
These are public acts
only to time.
We send messages across oceans
with a thumb.
We call it connection
and mean compression.
How much of the world fits
inside one object.
How much of ourselves disappears
to make room for it.
This is not about that.
This is about the hours
we spend inside our own head
without a receipt.
The screen time of thought.
The mind's eye scrolling endlessly
through memory, instinct, inheritance.
History carried in muscle.
Future hiding in reflex.
How does the body see the world
before the mind explains it.
How does the past breathe through us
without asking permission.
So many hows.
None of them idle.
The in between is preparation
we do not know we are doing.
A surprise message from a name
we thought time had finished with.
A face on the street
that rearranges something unnamed.
A colour in the sky
that refuses translation.
Artists pass us daily.
Unread.
Unheard.
Complete.
People with entire libraries inside them
waiting at bus stops.
Walking dogs.
Holding doors.
We will never know
what masterpiece they abandoned
to buy groceries.
And yet I see it.
Living proof everywhere.
Words used magnificently
and dissolved immediately back into air.
Beauty with no archive.
Who are the people we pass
every single day.
Who are we to them.
Who are we to ourselves
once the performance ends.
It is easy to open up.
It is harder to present the self
without staging it.
Harder still to admit
how little we know
about what we think we know.
So I offer this
as a synecdoche of a poem.
A part standing in for the whole.
A room held open
for the weight of ordinary minutes.
For the slow, monotonous movement of time
that does not bind us
but ties us gently,
persistently,
to being alive.
Fear naught.
No length can contain this.
No limit can close it.
This is made to hold
craft, intelligence,
and above all
the wholehearted quiet
where most of us
are already living.
