Continuity Studies

Time doesn’t pass. It thickens.

*

It gathers in the joints of the knees,

in the hinge of the jaw,

and in the quiet places where language no longer fits so easily.

*

People talk about progress as if it were a staircase.

I experience it as layered sediment,

fine particles settling over older versions of my original name.

*

Identity feels negotiated in back rooms.

Memory signs first.

Expectation adjusts the lighting until it's just right.

*

The body maintains its own debt records.

It tallies sugar, salt, hours without sleep.

It archives touch with alarming precision.

*

I used to think I would become something stable.

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My favorite color used to be purple.

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The realization arrives without context,

bright and self-contained,

a sticker peeled from a childhood notebook

and pressed into a philosophy lecture.

*

Somewhere between innocence and abstraction,

the world acquired its strange, sprawling weight.

Edges sharpen

And metaphors lose their milk teeth.

*

Desire refines itself into policy,

As fear revises its résumé.

Even longing must submit expense reports.

*

So I study continuity the way a surgeon studies scar tissue,

by carefully scanning and logging what refuses to disappear.

*

Every former self lingers at the perimeter.

They hum together softly in harmony,

a choir without choreography.

*

I remember believing that preferences revealed destiny.

Favorite colors.

Beloved seasons.

Hoped-for futures.

Now I inventory revisions instead.

What migrated,

calcified.

What evaporated without fanfare.

The sky insists on blue whether I prefer that or not.

And the body insists on gravity, too.

*

Essence, if it exists, behaves like weather,

uninterested in my thesis.

*

I still keep a few objects from that earlier life.

A bracelet with elastic nearly gone,

A notebook filled with rounded handwriting,

And a faded shade of purple that looks louder than it ever felt back then.

*

Continuity may be nothing more

than a series of provisional shapes

that agree, for a while,

to share a name.

*

I stand in the latest version of myself

and listen for the sound of sediment settling.

*

And something inside continues,

While something else watches from the other side of the fence.