After the moment

Inertia — 234

Minyeong Jeong

Time does not pass; it accumulates. Every moment leaves a trace like sediment, dust or a shadow. And in it we live not in the present, but among its residues.

I used to think time must move forward, cleanly—slide past like water. But wherever I look, it lingers. It gathers. On the table, a coffee cup can leave its small eclipse—a brown ring cooling into wood grain, the trace of heat and habit. It’s not the coffee I remember, but the outline it leaves, the faint tide mark of a morning gone by. The smell of burnt toast stays with it long after breakfast, the dust that dances in a shaft of light. We call it the present, but it’s full of ghosts: heat, scent, static, trace. Even the air can feel second-hand.

Then the window: a fog of breath. Someone’s hand pressed against it, once. When the warmth fades, the prints stay for a while—five small continents of touch, slowly fading back into glass.

In another room, the wallpaper holds its ghosts. When we moved into our first flat, even the wall and the floor bared prints its former ornaments. As if it resents the new emptiness.

Outside, the rain ends, and the air thickens with what’s left behind. That strange metallic sweetness—petrichor, they call it. But I think it’s just the earth remembering being wet. A smell that isn’t the rain itself, but its echo.

And later, the phone I’ve unplugged: a small square of heat in my palm, proof that something invisible has passed through it. The warmth cools, but not all at once; for a few seconds, the present hums with the just-happened.

Each residue speaks the same language. A whisper of energy refusing to vanish. Time, insisting on staying.

Nothing truly leaves. It leaves a thin film of residue—what once was. The table remembers the cup as the body remembers the touch. The sky bruises from where the sun has set.

If time has an economy, it’s this: slow spending of what clings on.

And so start to think of myself as residue too—layered from every version that I’ve alraedy spent time with. The laugh I no longer have, the callouses I’ve lost, the voices that still shape my silence. Maybe this is all the body is: a vessel of time’s remains, carrying forward what refuses to be erased. We accumulate and then we fade slowly.

Time does not pass through us; it collects. And we, like the walls and the weather, are what it leaves behind.