It felt like lightning, but the sky stayed still.
I didn’t see the branch first.
I saw its shadow—
cutting across concrete like a crack in silence.
It reminded me of lightning,
not in brightness,
but in shape—
how it leaves the sky momentarily torn.
This shadow did the same to the ground.
The branch was still, brittle, maybe forgotten.
But its echo—cast in light—moved louder than the object itself.
Like a gesture frozen mid-sentence.
I stood there, not because it asked anything of me,
but because it felt like something had just happened.
Sometimes, the shadow arrives before the thing that casts it.
Sometimes, what we feel comes long before we understand what we’re looking at.
