I’m beginning to believe there’s a shift that happens when souls depart this earth, that maybe their mortality isn’t truly acknowledged until it meets them. Everything feels unreal, suspended, until the moment arrives when we must say goodbye.
And I don’t speak of death as the body in the grave, but death in the spirit—a passing marked by the fading line between day and night. I mean the kind of death that closes in, when the things we cherished or took for granted stand on the verge of vanishing.
I have felt this... for a long time. It's the same way I felt the night my childhood ended—that death came knocking, unrelenting, with its cruel, raucous laugh, stripping me of innocence. In a way, I had died, don’t you think? That night by the window, feeling as though a life I deserved had been stolen from me. Briefly, bitterly, I realized I had never truly been a child, and I wished I had spent those years being one instead of becoming something I couldn’t recognize.
I often wonder why things die, and whether it is death that gives them meaning. Without death, perhaps art wouldn’t be sacred. Perhaps without loss, we wouldn’t learn. It is true—only through it have I come to understand the value of everything. The value of everyone.
Sometimes, I think of death in relation to endings. Like the close of a good book, the last sip of cold coffee, the final breeze of summer. Moments that seem so small, yet in their fleeting nature, they are grand—magnificent in ways we only realize after they’re gone.
The roses by your grave will wilt, and I will replace them, until one day the seasons change and the market no longer sells them. And I will think of the roses. I will think of you, and I will think of death. I will think of loss, and what it has made of me.
It’s only now, through the veil of your absence, that I see your beauty so clearly. And no one—no one—will ever match it. It’s only now I realize that I should have poured out all the love I had, the love now left to turn into grief. You will live forever in my memory, and it is through you that I will ever truly know love.
Comments