It Goes On
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
Life is a restless continuum—
a ceaseless, indifferent unfolding
that neither petitions our consent
nor pauses for our despair.
It advances with the steady, ancient patience
of tide pulling moonward,
of seasons rearranging the earth
without once asking if we are ready
to be remade.
We cling to moments
as if they are fixed,
as if memory were an anchor
and not a fragile construct
constantly rewritten
by the trembling hand of time.
We insist upon meaning,
upon narrative cohesion,
upon the illusion
that our suffering or our joy
might persuade the universe
to soften its march.
But life—
life is unbothered by our pleas.
It is movement incarnate,
progression absolute.
The beautiful truth,
and the terrifying one,
is that everything we encounter
is temporary:
the tremor of first love,
the collapse of grief,
the dull ache of ordinary days
that we mistake for permanence.
All of it—
every heartbreak,
every miracle,
every version of ourselves
we thought would last—
is swallowed eventually
by the relentless declaration
that defines existence:
it goes on.
And yet,
there is solace in this constancy.
A quiet mercy
in knowing that no darkness is final,
no joy exhaustive,
no season eternal.
Life renews itself
with or without our permission.
It metabolizes our losses,
reshapes our ruins,
and carries us forward
long after we have forgotten
how to rise on our own.
Perhaps that is the secret
we spend our lives resisting—
that survival is less an act of strength
than a surrender to continuation,
a willingness to be swept
into the next moment
even when the last one
has left us trembling.
It goes on.
Not because we are unbreakable,
but because life is.
It persists through fracture,
through absence,
through the quiet devastation
we think will stop the world.
But nothing stops the world.
Nothing halts the turning
of this vast, indifferent sphere
or the mysterious mercy
that keeps offering us
another dawn.
So we, too, go on—
not as monuments of resilience,
but as beings shaped
by the inexorable forward pull
of time itself.
We continue because life does,
because the universe refuses to stall
at our sorrow,
because the next breath arrives
even when we do not ask it to.
And in that continuation,
in that unchosen, unstoppable momentum,
there is a strange and sacred grace:
a chance to become again,
to remake what was broken,
to rise from the ashes
of all we swore would undo us.
Life goes on.
And somehow—
so do we.
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