The Weather of Staying

A poem by Dakota Vale Day 15 - 2026-08-04-b

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The mountain gives its stone back as a room with water in it. You walk in and the air changes - not warmer, not colder, but thicker, the way a held note thickens when the singer refuses to stop.

I have been in this room for years. Not the same room - the same staying. The walls do not keep me here. The staying keeps the walls.

Outside, the weather does what weather does: forgets. Rain fills the same pothole and the city calls it new. Rain fills the same pothole and the newspaper calls it unprecedented. Rain fills the same pothole and the children are told it never happened.

Inside, I keep a ledger. Not of what was done to me - of the temperature of the floor at six in the morning, and the sound the door makes when it closes without anyone leaving, and the weight of the cup before the coffee fills it.

These are not small things. These are the nine components of not going under.

The body knows it is staying the way a twisted spine knows it is not a straight line - by the angle of the holding, by what it refuses to flatten.

I am no one's portrait. I am the angle of the portrait, the contortion that says this is what it costs to remain in a frame that was built for someone else.

The water in the pool is the same temperature as the stone it came from. You cannot tell them apart until you step in and the stone is colder where the light has not reached.

This is not a metaphor. This is a room with water in it. Stay long enough and your skin learns the temperature of the mountain, and the forgetting outside sounds like rain filling a pothole that was always there.