Writing is weird. It is the one thing I strive for in life, and somehow it is also the thing that disappears the moment I need it most. In a world full of letdowns, it becomes a strange task to plead with words for release from realities scattered in front of me. Life sprinkles its seasoning of loss here and there, and that is usually when my writing leaves. It lives somewhere remote in my brain, boiling with inner emotion, waiting for a release that never comes.
Loss is like that. You do not understand it until it stands in the doorway, uninvited, refusing to leave. Negative trait or not, I think about death every day. Not dramatically, not with a plan. Just a quiet rehearsal running beneath everything.
Death scares me. The utter thought provokes me, suffocates me, dismembers my insides one organ at a time.
Death will always win. It is the only fixed point in a world that refuses to hold still. Everything else moves. Time shifts from person to person, from moment to moment, indifferent to what we are feeling while it passes.
It follows behind us each morning, walks beside us through meetings, through workouts, through laughter. It watches quietly as we attempt to build something lasting out of temporary matter.
Our bodies are always leaving us. Aging is just the polite word for it. Cells die. Skin loosens. Years stack up behind us while the future quietly shortens without announcement. One minute you imagine ten years ahead. The next, those ten years are gone, and they feel like a breath you forgot to finish.
We live as if we are accumulating something. Time. Memories. People. But the older we get, the more fluent we become in loss.
Someone said recently that we do not control our bodies. That unsettled me. I have always believed we do. I believed discipline was power. Effort was ownership. Strength was proof.
But bodies break. Cells mutate. Organs fail. Time moves forward whether we are ready or not.
Maybe control was never the point. Maybe the point is learning how to live inside something that will outlast us.
Death remains. And still, we wake up.
Demons drag behind lost souls. The ground feels soft beneath my feet, but my body feels heavy. I leave a footprint everywhere I step. I try to be strong, but the demons corrode the inside of me.
How do you keep going when the world weighs in, smothering you with life? How do you keep going when your insides pound against the walls of your body, demanding escape, but for the will to live they must stay intact?
I watched death eat my cat alive. It moved through him slowly, working its way around his body, stealing his oxygen with each exhale. Each breath grew smaller. Each moment became quieter. There was no announcement, no ceremony. Only disappearance.
To watch breath leave the living is remarkable, not in beauty, not in wonder, but in a way that empties the room and everything inside it. Remarkably emptying.
After it was over, the light stayed the same. The floor stayed the same. The world continued as if nothing had been taken. And that is what stayed with me. The absence. The way something can be there one moment and gone the next, and the world simply continues.
A strong heart and a soft touch.
And still, the breath keeps leaving us.
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