“Whispers of a Quiet Morning”
Israel Centeno
The morning broke like a whisper, not a shout, curling soft fingers of light through the slatted blinds, casting shadows that danced like ghosts on the walls. In the stillness, the world seemed to hold its breath, as if waiting for the first stirrings of the day to ripple its calm. But there were no stirrings — not from you. Not today. For today, you woke not with the burden of wanting or needing, but with the quiet, clean slate of indifference, a white sea stretching endless and untethered before you.
Gone were the fiery wants that used to burn in your chest, those reckless waves of yearning that tossed you from one fleeting desire to the next. Now, there was only a soft stillness, an absence that felt not like loss, but like freedom. As though some invisible chain had snapped in the night, and you drifted, weightless, unmoored from all that once defined you. The colors of the world bled together in your eyes, blurring into something that was neither dull nor vibrant, simply *there*, like the slow swell of the tide that does not demand attention but exists in quiet certainty.
Is this defeat, you wonder, as the morning settles on your skin like dew, cold but tender? Is this what they call surrender, the slipping away of preferences, of purpose? Perhaps. Or perhaps it is a kind of reckoning, a new beginning that wears the clothes of apathy but hums, faintly, with the song of release. There is a beauty in it, a beauty not loud or brazen, but one that lingers in the spaces between — between breath and thought, between light and shadow, between the *need* for meaning and the simple fact of *being*.
And though you move now through this landscape of muted colors, of quiet moments that neither call nor repel, there is something powerful in the absence of preference. Something that stirs not the heart but the soul, as though you have tapped into the deep rhythm of the earth itself, that pulse beneath all things. The old shapes and names no longer hold sway over you — the authors, the poems, the places that once painted the walls of your mind in brilliant hues. They have faded now, but in their place is a kind of vastness, an open field that stretches wide and quiet under a sky that does not judge or demand.
So you walk, not with urgency, but with calm. The path is neither lit nor dark; it simply is. And in this, perhaps you have found something truer than preference, truer than the loud calls of the world that once pulled you in every direction. Perhaps, like the slow roll of the sea, you have found the rhythm of yourself, where nothing need be defined, and everything — yes, even indifference — can be beautiful.
