Dear Conscience,
I am writing from a place where the signal sometimes drops. Not metaphorically, but literally. There are stretches here in the Himalayas where the network hesitates, messages stall mid-sentence and meaning buffers. It is in these pauses that I begin to hear other things again. I hear the wind rustling through the forest in my backyard, the stream trickling over a dry winter, the crackling of bamboo in the fire pit, and the earth’s older grammar.
I have been thinking about language. How it now arrives already shaped and how quickly they sound like us. Every age offers its narcotic. Television. Endless news. Social feed. Now we are presented with perfect sentences on tap. Yet each era asks the same questions:
Will you still think when thinking is optional?
Will you still wrestle when assistance is abundant?
Will you still walk when vehicles wait?
Am I becoming more efficient, but less alive?
It is from this landscape of interruption and listening that this poem begins:
Satellites hover.
Algorithms adjust.
Words arrive already shaped:
terms for love, for loss, for progress
ready to be repeated,
ready to sound like our own.
The tide moves through.
I watch it scroll
through wrists, through calendars, through the habit
of checking once more before sleep.
First breath.
First cry.
First login.
In fluorescent rooms, language thins.
Messages blinking everywhere.
Names chosen in advance.
A life entered into the network
before it learns the weight of its own hands.
Elsewhere, a body goes offline.
Speech gathers too late.
A status change follows:
the breath logged out,
the room left holding its quiet.
We try words anyway.
We call it meaning.
We call it closure.
Language does what it can,
then falls back.
Brahma scatters language like pollen.
Data, dust, syllables sticking where they can.
Shiva presses delete.
Precise, unburdened, exact.
Room is made.
The network keeps moving.
This is not belief.
It is maintenance.
Winter is a slow tide.
The pause between pulls.
The calendar keeps refreshing:
boxes clicked, years renamed,
a clean edge drawn through cold.
But roots do not recognise January.
Sap does not answer notifications.
Seeds ignore the prompt entirely.
Still, we announce a new year
while the earth is mid-sentence
resting its verbs, saving its strength.
The body runs on older code.
Caches warmth.
Waits.
I stand where the signal drops.
The sentence breaks.
Meaning buffers.
I release old files.
Definitions that no longer load,
dead tabs still draining the soul.
The body understands before language does.
Water at the ankles.
Cold. Pull.
We are made
of what we keep
of what we cannot say cleanly.
Cache in your long memory:
unfinished
held back with purpose
learning what can be said
and what must pass without words.
I must guard the places where words are born slowly. I must protect the awkward sentences, the half-thoughts, the drafts that embarrass me, for they are proof that I am still thinking, still feeling, still becoming. My voice was forged in silence, in mountains, in monsoon, in waiting, in doubt, and in love that had to find its own grammar. Protect that. For once the interior goes quiet, no technology will bring it back.
*Photo of Annapurna through the Window* by Hazel.
