You, matter

Consider the dust mote floating in the shaft of afternoon sun.
It navigates the air like a hull-less ship on a frantic ocean,
obeying currents of heat we cannot feel,
turning invisible the moment the light shifts two degrees to the west.
You're not so different from that suspension.

You're are the brief interruptions in the long, monotone hum of geology,
flickering with the same terrifying brevity
as a match struck in a cavern larger than the dark.

And yet, imagine the silence of a library without the turning of a single page.

Imagine the ocean without the friction of the wave against the rock.

There is a strange, quiet weight to being small.

If the universe is a sprawling, infinite fabric,
then you're the tension in the thread,
not the pattern itself, but the strain that holds the weave together.

Think of the comma in a sentence written by a giant.
It has no sound of its own,
it is merely a pause, a breath, a tiny, hooked mark
dwarfed by the nouns and verbs that surround it.

But without that pause,
the meaning collapses into noise.

To be insignificant is to be the vessel, not the water.

It is to be the dark space between the stars that allows the light to travel.

You matter not because you persist,
but because for a fraction of a second,
you're the only place in the cosmos
where the universe could look at itself and ask,
“What am I?”