A thick fog seems to cling to the common path. Most move within it, a slow, uncertain drift. Decisions bloom, tiny, brightly colored, and often poisonous. They reach for them, hands grasping air, believing the bright lie. A chorus of surprised sighs, then the slow, clumsy climb out, ready to repeat the error. And I stand here, dry , on the slightly firmer ground. The distance I have not traveled down that easy, foolish slope— this quiet space, this lack of immediate ruin— A hollow offering. The very act of stepping around the visible trap, the thing clearly marked with sharp edges, requires no great lift of spirit. It is merely the absence of a fall. The accomplishment is small, a subtraction from disaster, and they mistake it for a masterpiece of foresight.The apology hangs, a small, flat stone dropped into a deep well. My bad. A sound swallowed quickly. It has done nothing. No ripple spreads outward, no cleansing wave washes clean the space between us. We are not explorers then, not charting new territories with the sudden glint of found knowledge. Words do not drift in like helpful currents, whispered to us by the sea foam. They arrive instead, or perhaps they simply are, originating from orbits we cannot quite map, those who tend gardens of endless distraction, whose free moments are currency for compounding dust-ups. More drama, they accumulate. More texture for the tapestry of the slightly beside the point. What echoes in the air, the shape of the sound, the performance of the feeling— it sits far distant from the solid core of the thing itself. There is a song, yes, a melody playing softly, and there is the dense, quiet ground of your receptive business, the receiving station tuned in, but only so far. It does not retain the message. It doesn't hold the heat. It does not confirm the statement: It is not the sole explanation. Because the work of paper is not their The reason you stand here, with certainty, is a complicated not, and you do not need to unravel it for me. I do not have the corresponding void. I have no query waiting for shipment. The path forks, or maybe it doesn't. The air remains still. I do not require clarification. The silence answers itself. I watch the stumble, a slow-motion slide, the weight shifting, unbalanced, the inevitable lean. It is the sharp, predictable turn, a groove worn deep in the soft earth, into the shallow ditch we always spoke of, but never truly saw coming, even as we charted the course. Clarifying a necessary to recognize and claim a good name Sin my bad for who has done nothing. The dust settles, thick and dull, on the same old landscape. Not like we're searching for gold, or a hidden map. It is simpler in the just

Apologies my sin bad