Mineral Silence

Live life with such abandon

that even its retelling

turns the storyteller's blood

into something

that no longer remembers warmth.

Something that settles,

slowly,

irreversibly,

into the weight

of mineral silence

while they are still breathing.

There are lives like that;

lives that refuse

to end

with the body.

Lives that escape

their blood work,

leaking instead

into breath that isn’t theirs anymore,

finding shelter

inside mouths

never prepared

for the taste of them.

Until memory

ceases to be recollection,

and becomes something 

that outlives explanation.

By the time

the story reaches

its ending,

the one telling it

has already forgotten

what breath

was ever trying

to keep alive.

Not as metaphor.

As consequence.

Not as fear.

As residue.

The soul,

if there is still

such a word

for what remains

after language

has finished borrowing it, 

does not leave.

It merely discovers

another way

to haunt.

Then write death

with equal depth.

Not as an ending.

Endings are merciful.

Write it

as something

that refuses

to finish dying.

Write it

so that before

the tale arrives

at its final sentence,

the listener

has already begun

to rearrange

their understanding

of survival.

So that grief

does not wait

for the last word,

but enters quietly,

halfway through the telling,

and by the end,

the story

is no longer

about the dead,

but about the living

trying,

and failing,

to remain

unchanged,

mistaking

outliving them

for breathing.