what is being preserved right now

Contemporary Amber

the resin is forming. you don't know it yet.

Amber is not a thing of the past. The resin is always flowing. Right now, in you, things are being slowly encased — caught mid-movement, suspended in a substance you can't feel. The tree never knew it was making fossils. Neither do you. You find out later. In the excavating.

• The last time you mispronounced a word before anyone corrected you — that version, the way it lived in your mouth for years without shame, already suspended
• A parking lot that a song belongs to forever now, because of something that happened once while it was playing, and you can no longer hear one without the other
• The specific resistance of a door in a house that no longer stands — the slight drag before it gave — preserved in your wrist
• The way a dead person held their fork: preserved only inside the people who ate with them, slowly diffusing as those people age
• Every inside joke with an expiry date that passed, and the two people who still laugh at it without being able to explain why to anyone else
• The coffee that tasted like itself, from the cup you used every morning until the morning you broke it, and the ordinary Tuesday you didn't know was the last
• A face on a train in 2019. You thought about it for three days, then forgot. Except you didn't. A formless residue is still in there, unlocated.
• Handwriting that will never be written again, still on paper in a drawer somewhere, waiting to be found by someone who cannot read cursive
• The ceiling of a childhood bedroom you stared at ten thousand times and could still reconstruct in perfect detail — which you will never be asked to do
• The silence after a particular argument that ended without ending: preserved in the body, not the memory
• A phone number memorized in 2004, still perfectly retrievable, going nowhere
• The sound of your own voice before you heard a recording of it and understood you had been wrong about yourself all along
• The word being coined right now, today, in someone's group chat — hardening as it spreads — becoming a fossil before anyone notices it has a shape
• This exact moment. What you were thinking just before you read this sentence. Already gone. Already in amber.

The resin doesn't announce itself.
Neither does the moment it closes over something.
You find out later, in the excavating —
if anyone ever digs.