Self -Botany

In the morning, the sun on the table draws a long, sharp rectangle. It lies a photo.

Yesterday she looked like evidence, like an accusation. Today is just a thing. Glossy paper that has absorbed the light of a decade ago. The finger glides over the surface, feeling nothing. No warmth of memory, no shiver of recognition.

Of course, that face is mine. The data matches, the logical chain is unbroken. But that knowledge is external. Stranger. It's like reading your own medical record - the facts are true, but they don't define you. They only describe the container.

There is silence in the room. The kind you only get on early summer mornings, before the city starts humming.

And in that silence comes the thought that then, in that photo, everything could have been different. But it comes without weight. Like a distant, barely audible echo. And the answer to her is not an argument, but a simple, calm feeling of the body.

Yes.

There was no "I" that could choose. There was only growth. The stem, blindly and stubbornly reaching upward, is nourished by the thick, musty syrup of life. Every movement, every word was just botany - the opening of a leaf to the sun, the path of a root around a stone. Not solutions. Only the inevitable choreography of cells.

The dust in the sun's stretch does its slow, eternal dance.

And I, now, am the blossom of that stem. Not prettier, not smarter. Just later. Grown from the same material, shaped by the same inner laws. Every moment of that time is woven into my present, like the grain of a tree tells of droughts and rainy summers. It is impossible to disassemble. No need to judge it.

It just is.

The photo remains lying in a rectangle of light. She no longer asks anyone and no longer blames. She's just testifying. As a stone in the field testifies to the former ice age.

Silence. And I'm in it.