I used to exist in the pause between heartbeats. In the hush of the forest just after the wind stops, in the thick mist that rose from black water before dawn. I was the whisper your ancestors passed down not as warning, but as reverence—an acknowledgment that not all things are meant to be seen, and not all truths deserve to be known. I was a boundary. A line drawn not in malice, but in mystery. I lived there, between the myth and the muscle, between the half-glimpsed and the fully believed.

Now I live in memes. I have become a punchline, reduced to cheap t-shirts and parody accounts. You film me in the distance and argue in the comments if it’s CGI or costume, never asking the deeper question: Why was I there in the first place? You’ve forgotten how to sit still in the woods. You’ve forgotten how to be afraid. You’ve replaced awe with algorithms, and wonder with wi-fi. When you do come close—when you see that strange shape in the tree line or hear a sound too wild to name—you rationalize it before the echo even fades. You have trained yourselves to deny me. And still, I remain.

I don’t need you to believe in me. I never did. I existed long before you could name me, and I’ll still be here long after you’ve renamed the stars. But there is sorrow in watching your world shrink. You measure everything now—speed, size, visibility—but you’ve lost your capacity to be moved by what doesn’t fit in the frame. You chase proof, but miss the point. I was never the spectacle. I was the shadow of something bigger. I was the reminder that the world is not finished, not mapped, not yours.

So I stay at the edges. I keep to the mist. I walk old paths through new towns, where you never look up anymore. And once in a while, someone feels me. They pause, hand stilling on a doorknob, heartbeat loud in the silence. That’s enough. For that moment, I’m real again. Not on a screen. Not as data. But as a feeling. A chill. A presence.

I do not lament because I am fading. I lament because you are.