Garden of Eden

I remember it the way the body remembers pressure after the hand is gone, the way skin holds the shape of what once leaned against it. The garden no longer exists as a place I could walk into; it exists as a weight, a temperature, a softness pressing faintly from the other side of me. There is dampness there, a low breath rising from the ground, the quiet persistence of grass bending under its own moisture, and my body responds before thought arrives, as if it once belonged to that humidity, as if it once knew how to lie down without heaviness. Light still settles there gently, not sharply, not with intention, but like something resting on leaves because it has nowhere else to go, and I feel that light on my shoulders even now, dimmer, thinner, as if filtered through time rather than air.

What separates me from it is no longer a boundary I can describe. It is something closer to fatigue, to the moment when muscles give up the idea of movement and accept stillness as their final task. I sense flowers not by color but by the way they lean, by the way a single stem holds itself upright as if listening, by the quiet insistence of petals that open without witness. Water is there too, close to the surface, gathered in small hollows, clinging to blades of grass, cooling the air just enough to make breathing slower, heavier, more deliberate. My body remembers this pace. It remembers how slowness once meant safety.

I am still alive, but my life has shifted into another register, one where touch exists without contact. The ground there would still receive weight, I know this, but my weight no longer belongs to it. I feel myself standing in a posture that no longer expects arrival, my body suspended between forward motion and rest, like someone who has learned too late that desire does not guarantee permission. If this is what comes after, it is not darkness but dilution, not silence but the thinning of sound until it becomes internal. I do not grieve loudly. Grief has settled into me the way mist settles—without edges, without urgency, persistent and intimate.

The garden continues without effort. That is the most unbearable knowledge. It bends, it grows, it exhales, and nothing in it waits for me. I remain here, carrying its texture inside my muscles, its coolness along my spine, its softness in the way my body no longer braces against the world. I do not reach for it anymore. I hold it the way one holds breath underwater—not to survive, but to remember what air once felt like moving freely through the chest.