Those of the In-Between

I was born before the world

learned how to blink.

Back when silence had weight,

and time carried a smell—

dust, warm grass, metal in the sun.

I remember hands more than screens,

voices before faces,

names learned through repetition,

not suggestion.

The world wasn’t slow.

It was listening.

We waited for letters

the way people now wait for replies—

holding our breath,

without refreshing the moment.

Then the screens arrived.

They learned to speak fast,

and we learned to answer faster.

I watched music lose its body,

maps fold themselves into the sky,

memories get stored

without ever settling.

I still know how to fix things

without a tutorial,

how to find my way

without asking a voice that never sleeps.

I know the world without traces,

and the one that remembers everything.

Sometimes they look at us

like early drafts of being human.

But we carry something

no system has learned to compute:

You can change

without disappearing.

We buried friends

and learned new gestures.

We said goodbye

and kept walking anyway.

We were born before the stream,

but we learned how to swim inside it.

If we have a role,

it isn’t to explain the past

or fear the future.

It’s to hold the middle.

To keep the line from breaking.

Because someone has to remember

the ground underfoot

while the world learns how to fly.

And maybe that’s what aging is—

not slowing the world down,

but reminding it

where it still touches the earth.