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The Gentle Arithmetic of Dying

 There are days when the sky feels like it’s been borrowed from another lifetime, one where you already died and came back just to remember how light feels against your eyelids. Death, then, is not an ending, but a flavor, sharp, metallic, inevitable. We are all sipping it, drop by drop, through every birthday candle we blow out and every mirror that forgets our younger faces.


And yet, what makes it both cruel and divine is how quietly it arrives. It doesn’t knock. It doesn’t send a letter or mark a date on your calendar. It just appears one day, like an uninvited guest slipping into the room while you’re still mid-laugh, or mid sentence, or mid dream. There’s no schedule for endings. No rehearsal for the last breath. Sometimes it’s a whisper. Sometimes it’s a crash. Sometimes it’s a stillness so sudden that even time holds its breath. You never really see it coming, and maybe that’s its secret mercy or its cruelest trick. A curse or a blessing, depending on the day and the heart you ask.


I’ve begun to think mortality isn’t our punishment; it’s our permission slip. Imagine if we were immortal, truly endless. Would love still burn like it does now, frantic and trembling? Would art still ache the way it does, knowing it’s racing against decay? A rose that never withers is not a miracle,it’s a boredom stretched thin. The beauty of petals is in their surrender.


There’s a strange mercy in the ticking clock. Knowing that every conversation, every glance, every breath is slipping toward disappearance, it forces you to see this moment as holy. We become aware of the sacred in the ordinary, the way someone laughs with their head tilted back, the faint hum of a fridge at midnight, the scent of rain rising from concrete. Death sharpens life’s edges, turns the blur into focus.


But immortality, what a haunting thought. What if we could live forever? Would we stop fearing the loss of time, only to start fearing the loss of meaning? Imagine watching centuries pass, lovers turning to dust while you remain unchanged, a witness trapped in the loop of remembering. Maybe heaven isn’t eternal life. Maybe heaven is the ability to die beautifully, knowing you’ve been fully here.


And yet, I can’t help but wonder, what if death is not departure, but expansion? What if, when we go, we don’t vanish, we dissolve, like sugar in tea, sweetening the whole universe without a trace?


Sometimes I dream that when I die, I’ll wake up as the wind. I’ll brush against people’s faces, stir trees into gentle applause, slip quietly through half-open windows. No one will see me, but maybe they’ll feel me, and think, for a second, that something divine just passed by.


Maybe that’s what immortality really is,not existing forever, but being felt forever.


And so, I sit here, alive for now, listening to my pulse like a small, stubborn drum. It beats to remind me that everything is temporary, and that’s the most beautiful thing about being here. Because if forever were real, nothing would matter. But since it isn’t, everything does.


Still, I think there are fragments that defy the fade, soft rebellions against time itself. A laugh that echoes in memory long after the room is silent. A touch that lingers like a phantom warmth. The way someone once looked at you as if you were the only real thing in the world. Those are the quiet eternities, the secret forevers stitched into our brief existence.


Maybe that’s what’s worth staying for.

Not the promise of endless life, but the moments that feel endless.

The forevers that hide inside a mortal heartbeat.

You, and your forevers, whispering softly against the current, refusing to end, even when we do.

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