I.
At first,
only time was breathing.
A tenuous thread,
almost inaudible,
stretched between what had not yet been
and what already sensed its end.
The gesture was minimal.
Meaning, suspended.
Time offered itself as an unspoken promise,
as if promising were somehow indecent
in the presence of such fragile stillness.
Everything fit there.
Desire,
waiting,
the illusion that duration
was a natural virtue.
II.
Gradually, the sound acquired body.
Layers accumulated
like decisions never assumed.
Harmony began to yield
under the weight of addition.
They called this maturity.
They called this a path.
But time did not evolve.
It merely repeated itself
with a more refined vocabulary.
Hope became method.
Waiting, a system.
Postponement, an ethic.
And what had been promise
began to demand loyalty
without ever being fulfilled.
III.
Then, the noise.
Nothing fit anymore.
Notes no longer sought consonance.
Each gesture affirmed the opposite of the previous one
with equal conviction.
Time revealed its artifice:
it does not heal,
it does not teach,
it does not redeem.
It manages.
It neutralizes.
It normalizes the unbearable.
Pain became functional.
Emptiness, tolerable.
Suffering, discreet enough
not to interrupt the flow.
Here, incompatible forces
occupy the same space
without ever converging.
One demands advance,
another dissolves the ground.
Neither prevails.
Neither yields.
The body remains suspended
between irreconcilable impulses,
unable to choose
without betraying something essential.
Everything vibrates,
everything exhausts itself,
everything persists
without direction.
IV.
And then, the fall.
The weight of what never was
settled with solemn gravity.
Not as lament,
but as acknowledgment.
Time revealed its somber face:
indifferent,
impersonal,
divinely aloof.
To reach what is not known,
one must cross ignorance.
To possess what is not possessed,
one must relinquish possession.
To become what one is not,
one must pass through a place
where nothing recognizes anyone.
What remains is not truth.
It is residue.
What survives is neither the best,
nor the just,
nor the most loved.
What survives
is what was exhausted last.
V.
The sound begins to thin.
Excess dissolves.
Dissonance grows weary of itself.
There is no longer a question.
There is no longer an accusation.
Only the belated recognition
that time
was not a path,
but erosion.
Not a line,
but a spiral.
It led nowhere.
It only deepened.
VI.
The metronome insists
on one final pulse.
Brief.
Exact.
Irrecoverable.
Within that minimal interval,
something is revealed
without being formulated.
There is no language
for what is known there.
No return
for the one who knows it.
The sound falters.
It does not resolve.
It ceases.
The light dims slowly,
as if honoring
the gravity of the moment.
The curtain descends
without gesture,
without answer,
without witnesses.
Time does not conclude.
It withdraws.
And what was understood
in the final measure
remains inaccessible
to those still breathing.
Silence.
Author’s Note:
This poem was written while listening to Casta Diva, in Maria Callas’s voice.
Not as inspiration, but as atmosphere.
The intention was not to narrate time,
but to let it breathe, accumulate, fracture, and withdraw.
To follow its movement from promise to saturation,
from excess to residue,
from sound to suspension.
What unfolds here is less a story than a progression of states:
tenderness giving way to strain,
strain collapsing into gravity,
gravity dissolving into silence.
If something is revealed at the end,
it is not meant to be shared.
Some understandings belong only
to the instant in which they occur.
The rest is echo.
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