In-Between Spaces

A reflection on presence and the fleeting nature of experience.

This poem explores the space between anticipation and memory—the narrow but expansive place we often call the present moment.

It imagines each instant not as a transition to something else, but as a complete world unto itself: brief, alive, and worthy of attention.

Rather than asking life to happen somewhere ahead or after, this piece returns to the possibility that life may already be unfolding here.

For much of my life, presence felt like something I should practice rather than something I genuinely understood.

My attention was often pulled forward into what came next or backward into what had already happened. I thought meaning lived in outcomes, reflection, certainty, or achievement.

But increasingly I've found that life does not actually happen in those places.

Life happens here.

Not in the future we imagine or the past we revisit, but in this strange and fleeting space where experience is continuously arriving and disappearing.

This poem was an early attempt to name that realization.

That joy, grief, beauty, liberation, suffering—all of it unfolds in moments so brief they almost disappear.

And yet somehow, moment after moment, they become a life.