Of course it’s still there.
Volcanoes are rude that way.
They don’t wait for witnesses.
-
The rock was brooding in its crater
long before the plane ever tilted its wing over the Atlantic,
rehearsing the exact shade of black it would wear
when you stepped out of the cave mouth.
-
It practiced that jacaranda light
for four hundred million years
just to get the highlight right
for the thirty seconds
you stood blinking at it.
-
Now you’re gone, and it’s still there,
cooling another micrometer,
growing a new skin of moss
that will outlive your grandchildren,
letting the goose walk across its back,
a slow, feathered inspector.
-
But it misses you a little.
Not in the sentimental way humans miss.
It misses you the way a bell
misses the hand that once struck it.
-
The echo you left is still traveling outward.
Yes, the island exists without you,
insultingly well.
The cave keeps its mouth open
for the next pair of eyes
that will mistake it for a question.
The friar’s statue keeps not-smiling at whatever century shows up next.
-
Yet every time the wind
moves the jacarandas,
one petal drifts down
and lands
exactly where your shadow stood.
-
The rock notices,
files the moment,
chooses not to erupt.
-
You did not invent the volcano.
But it has added a new mineral to its mix,
a single grain, shaped like the space you took
when you believed,
for one bright unrepeatable afternoon,
that the world had been waiting for you to arrive
so it could finally be completely itself.
-
It will keep that grain warm
until the next wanderer wonders the same thing.
Then it will shrug,
drop another purple petal,
and go back to being eternal
the way only something absolutely certain of being left behind
can afford to be.