Millions of Moments

By Peter Bowden

The man lifted his cup and the steam rose like a ghost of time, curling with the fragrance of mornings long gone. Around him the room was still, yet he felt the air crowded with company—footsteps, voices, laughter folded into invisible pages. Moments did not die, he thought; they hovered like fireflies in the dusk, blinking their small eternal light.

He saw them then: his father’s hands guiding the shovel into soil, the crisp sting of earth against dawn. A child’s laughter broke like glass into the summer air, barefoot and wild, the sound still running, still echoing. And the woman’s glance—soft, unspoken—flashed again like a match in the dark, burning a warmth that never cooled. Even silence returned to him, not as emptiness, but as a living hush, a breath that watched and waited.

Every second was a thread, golden and endless, weaving through him. Millions of moments, he realized, did not scatter or vanish—they gathered, they sang, they pressed close like stars across the black. And in that chorus he understood: he was not alone, nor would he ever be, for the world was made of memory that refused to fade.


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