I have been thinking lately about how everything, eventually, falls apart. Not always suddenly or drastically but just a slow unraveling, like a sweater snagged on something invisible. One tug, and suddenly there's a thread loose, and then another. Until what was once whole becomes something softer, more uncertain.
Maybe it's the season. Autumn is always about endings disguised as beauty. Leaves pretending to die gracefully when really they're just surrendering. Everything golden, everything fading. I think that's what makes it tolerable; the illusion that decay can look like art.
Things in life are falling apart harshly now. Rain comes without warning and sweeps the leaves from the trees before they can finish dying beautifully. The branches wake up naked, surprised. The air smells of endings.
I keep thinking, or maybe hoping, that I can sense the moment before collapse. But there is no warning for the kind of unraveling that happens inside silence. It starts as a small shifting, a shadow that moves when it shouldn't. Then everything is rearranged.
There are days when I feel like the thread itself, thin, tensile, stretched between what was and what refuses to be. I keep pulling, softly, testing the strength of what's left. But the fabric of things no longer holds. It opens like a mouth that can't remember how to speak.
I watch the world for signs, as if meaning might gather itself in corners. A bird landing heavily on a wire. The last bit of sunlight caught on a window. A cup cracked but still holding water. There is a language in these small failures. A syntax of breaking.
Maybe this is what living is. The steady apprenticeship to loss. Learning how to inhabit the intervals between what falls and what remains. To find a rhythm in the collapse, a tenderness in the undoing.Sometimes I imagine gathering the fallen pieces. The hours, the habits, the small rituals of certainty. I lay them out like stones in a river. The current moves through them anyway, reshaping what I thought was mine.
What is left after everything has fallen apart? The question sounds simple until it isn't. Because it's not absence that follows, but a new kind of presence, raw and trembling and half-born. A self that has shed its scaffolding and is unsure how to stand.
The world becomes porous then. Time slips through. The skin of things thins until everything feels like breath. Even the walls hum. Even the light aches.
Falling apart is not an ending but a revealing. What comes loose was never meant to stay. What disintegrates was only ever a temporary form of something wider, something that refuses containment.
And maybe, if I listen closely, there is mercy in it. The breaking opens a door to another kind of seeing. Not the sharp clarity of control, but the soft vision of surrender. To know the world not by holding it together, but by feeling it dissolve against the palm.
I think of the trees again, their bare limbs reaching upward, unashamed. They have lost everything, yet they are still alive, still gathering light. There’s a strange kind of courage in that, to keep growing after the fall.
And so I let things fall. I let them scatter where they will.
Then comes the quiet. Then comes the blur. Words slide away from meaning. I can feel the edges softening, the world folding in on itself like paper in water. I am reaching but nothing holds. Threads everywhere. Light leaking through. I think I was something once, or someone. I think there was a center. Now only small motions remain, the breath, the pulse, the faint sound of things loosening. Falling apart and apart and apart.