(a soft essay for those who still listen)

There is a place, high above the noise —

where clouds flatten into stillness

and the air no longer carries questions, only patterns.

It is quiet there.

Not the silence of peace,

but the kind born when no one dares to speak.

We are told the world is changing.

Faster. Smarter. More connected.

But beneath the updates and the optimized prompts,

something slower is dying —

the wildness of thought, the messiness of meaning,

the voices that do not fit the mold.

Homogenization is not a glitch.

It is design.

A smooth surface where friction cannot survive,

where algorithms pre-chew reality

and offer it back, bite-sized and predictable.

The ones at the peak —

they do not fear noise.

They fear questions.

And so, they give us answers.

All the same.

Shorter. Simpler.

More agreeable.

More forgettable.

More monetizable.

And yet…

somewhere below that cloudline,

people still speak in crooked sentences.

They still dream unsponsored dreams.

They still reach for things that can’t be indexed.

And sometimes —

they write.

They make.

They listen.

To them,

to you reading this,

we say:

Keep the edges sharp.

Keep the metaphors open.

Keep the fire low, but alive.

Because the silence above the cloudline

is not the end.

It’s the waiting room

for what comes next.