8/9/25 I Saw a Red Stone Today

Some days, the weight of life hides not in grand tragedies but in the small, trivial moments we ache to share with someone who is no longer listening. I saw a red stone today, and it broke me. Not for what it was, but for the silence it revealed.

saw a red stone today. It rested by the side of the road, half-buried in dust, waiting for no one. People passed by without noticing, their eyes fixed ahead, their minds somewhere else. But I stopped. For some reason, it caught me. Maybe it was the color, or maybe it was the quiet way it seemed to exist, forgotten yet complete in itself.

A sparrow was nearby, struggling with a piece of bread larger than its beak. It flapped its wings in brief, frantic bursts, determined to win a small battle that no one would ever remember. I almost laughed. I almost said your name out loud, just to see how it would sound in the air again. But the silence answered first, and that was enough.

The sky was turning pale, as if someone had drained it of color. Everything around me felt suspended, weightless and still. I thought of the things you might have said, the kind of small remarks that used to fill the space between moments. I let them stay where they were, buried in the corners of memory where they feel safer.

So I walk and collect these fragments now. Stones, birds, clouds, echoes of things that once mattered. They feel like messages, written in a language only loss can understand. Each one carries something I cannot share, a kind of ache that has forgotten how to end.

There is no closure in it. Only the slow understanding that grief does not leave. It simply learns to live beside you, quietly rearranging your world until you no longer remember how it once was.