Your body is a counting machine.
Once it learns a pulse, it holds the count even in silence. The music stops. Your foot keeps tapping.
This is called a ghost beat.
The rhythm outlasts the sound that made it.
This is not a flaw.
This is how the body says: I was here. I felt this. I counted.
The original rhythm is the one you never chose.
Before you had a name, before you had a thought, you were already inside one — the heartbeat of whoever held you.
Seventy beats per minute. You floated in it for nine months. You learned the shape of time from a pulse you didn't know was a pulse.
Maybe all rhythm, forever after, is just that one remembered.
The beat above has stopped.
Your body is still expecting the next one.
You can feel the empty space where it would have been.
That is the ghost beat.
After three days on a boat, you step onto land and the ground still rocks. The ocean is gone but your body hasn't heard yet. You walk in a rhythm the water made.
He died in October. In April you still reach for your phone on Sunday mornings, the old rhythm of it, still counting.
Your body is keeping perfect time. Just the wrong time. The clock that trained it is five thousand miles away.
The concert ends. Everyone holds their breath — that moment before applause — where the whole room is together in the silence, still inside the music, counting.