One day, you will say goodbye
without knowing
it was the last rehearsal.
You’ll toss a joke like a coin
over your shoulder,
and it will land face-down
in a place you’ll never go back to.
That friend,
the one who knew your laugh from a hallway away,
will become a name
you say too softly,
like it might hear you.
You will walk into your house
and find a mug
where their hands used to be.
You’ll forget
how they took their coffee
until a smell on someone else’s collar
undoes you in line at the post office.
There is a last time
for everything.
The last late-night text
before the phone gets wiped.
The last argument
that never needed to happen.
The last “I’m just tired”
that meant “I’m already leaving.”
You will hold your child one night
with their nose pressed to your neck,
and not know
that the next time,
they’ll be taller,
and flinch
at being held too long.
You’ll back out of a driveway
and see your parents wave
in the mirror,
like always.
And maybe that wave
will echo later,
when the hospital smells like bleach and beeping
and they don’t look like they
used to.
You will laugh
with someone
about a show you both love,
and that show
will end.
And they
will not be there
for the reboot.
You’ll wake one morning
with a name on your tongue
and no one to give it to.
All things end.
Not with a bang.
But with the slow disassembly of chairs
at a wedding
no one remembers attending.
Even the jokes get tired.
Even the strong arms grow thin.
And it is not fair.
It was never fair.
No one asked if we wanted
to love things that die.
But –
What if the film that flaps
in the projector
means the story is whole?
What if the door
we walk through at the end
was carved
to the size of our grief?
What if every ending
was the exact shape
of beginning again,
only backward,
like a record spun in reverse
to reveal the secret track?
What if the worst thing
isn’t that it ends
but that we thought
it wouldn’t?
So here –
when the last cup is washed,
and the porch glow flickers out,
and you are alone
in the place
where they once sat
take the silence
like a photo.
Hold it up to the glow.
And then:
a murmur.
Not from the world that left,
but from the one
that waits.
Not “Goodbye.”
But
“It was always going to be this beautiful.”
And
“You’re almost home.”
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