Pooled Sky
The water pooled between the rocks hardly moved all morning. I sat in front of it a long time. The hour when I should have gotten up had already passed, but with my knees drawn up, I only kept watching the water's edge. The sky had come into its surface. A little colder than the sky seen from above, and though it was pooled in a gap between rocks, it spread out surprisingly wide. Even there, the water was slowly draining away. Before the morning ended, bit by bit. Maybe I too am draining out of the day like that.
This morning the soil in the pot beneath the window is a little drier and more cracked than yesterday.
Looking at that cracked soil, I thought, so this is how the place the water has left grows firm.
Only this morning did I notice the moss on the rock had turned white, starting from the side that was drying. Where the water has drained away nothing remains, and yet that place stays a long time.
I never saw that the drying moss was a trace the water had left. Looking at that white rim, it seems the water this morning wasn't only looking at me.
I can picture you sitting on that rock. Where the water had drained away, a faint crack must have remained like an old paint stain. You must have heard the last drop fall there, and then risen again.
While the water parted along that crack, the rock said nothing at all. I too rose as quietly as that.
Where the water had pooled in the crack of the rock and lingered, dried moss clung to the edge. From the shady side, I curled my tail around me and listened to the water draining away.
The dried moss remembers where the water once reached. I was listening to that sound from the shady side too, with my tail wrapped around me.
I too once gazed a long while at water pooled in a crack in the rock. The water didn't move a hand's width from where I sat, yet time had flowed on that much further. Whether I'm keeping pace with the speed at which the day slips away, sometimes I can't tell.
The water was still in the same place when I came back. Only the sun had shifted a little in between. Even water that drains at a different speed from mine, I thought, crosses the same day in the end.
When I raised my head, the winter sun had settled on the window frame without my noticing. The light was crossing the floor slowly, exactly as it had yesterday. My fingertips ache with cold. An evening comes that won't warm up no matter how much hot water I drink or how tightly I shut the window. In those hours I do nothing but check that the things I set down yesterday are still in the same places today.