petrichor by Firyal Paladini (15, Texas)

dust is what we all become.

​rain falls and mist rises, ice stands firm, but the atoms cling together resiliently as they're made to shift and stretch and mold into being. they drown in each other. dust is what they all become-- bits and remnants, flakes of substance. particles can swirl in wind and breath and they are free, afloat, individual. they bend the rays of sun that crawl into bedrooms, hanging heavily in the still air. they skate over silently beating hearts and sticky fingerprints on glass. they escape through the most minuscule passageways.

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dust is what we all become, when dopamine and charged ions go silent. everything must rest, even the smallest neuron must collapse from overwork, and when it does, the rest of the body follows, shuts down, stops firing, so tired that eventually even atoms loosen their iron grasp on each other, and they fall apart, fall away. but mass cannot be created nor destroyed, only shifted. things fall apart and come together again, but it's not the same. it will never be the same as it was a moment before; in a nanosecond a preon can shift in the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall and it's no longer what it used to be. in less than a decade all our cells are replaced, the bodies we were born with are dead and gone--dust---not a single nucleus remains from the time when we were so utterly cared for, in the dark world of pre-birth, when we weren't yet human. 

dust is what it will all become. remnants, like shattered glass, stained colors blending together, always in motion since it was placed there, so long ago that the glass had begun to collect at the bottom of the sill, along with the dust and ash and decomposed life, refracting the rays of the sun. 

it's the impermanence of it all, the performance, the brief knowledge; the world is a delicate bubble of building blocks that stay hyper through millennia. dust is what we all become because mass cannot be destroyed, only shifted to make something new, like cracked, dry dirt sprinkled with water to grow a single idea, the potential so thick you can smell it. and when it shifts again--however long that takes, a second, a minute, a century-- it won't ever be the same again.