We Do Not ‘End’. We Become.

We do not end,
we become —
not because we will it, not because the clock stops or the eyes close or the room goes silent or the lights fade out,
but because the becoming is the only thing we have ever done, the only real verb that keeps repeating itself long after the name is forgotten and the voice no longer echoes in dinner table conversations or digital timelines or whispered regrets,
because even when our bones dissolve into the soil or our names are sandpapered from stone or screens,
something of us—our stubborn dreams, unfinished thoughts, barely-written love letters, spilled tea stains, crooked laugh lines, or the sigh that escaped us when the stars looked a bit too close—
drifts, grows, pulses, reforms, takes the shape of memory or myth or metaphor or migratory birds chasing the last breath of summer across the fading skies of another’s life,
and even if no one remembers the sound of our voice, perhaps someone hums a tune in the shower that we once sang absentmindedly while chopping onions on a rainy Tuesday,
and even if no one remembers our name, someone somewhere might still look at a lamp-lit room, or the swirl of cinnamon in their coffee, or the way the curtain dances in the wind and feel suddenly, unreasonably, unexplainably comforted—
as if the presence of someone who once mattered is still wrapped around the air, like warmth lingering in a room after the fire has died down,
and perhaps it’s not so much about legacy or immortality or fame, but more about residue, about how we never really disappear, we just rearrange,
just like the river does not end at the mouth but enters the sea and calls it home,
just like the leaves do not vanish when they fall but cradle seeds in their decay,
just like the words written in ink do not die when the page is torn but echo in someone else’s whisper in a city we never visited,
and when we are gone—gone from the deadlines and the school runs and the gas bills and the inner monologues about whether we mattered at all—
we will not be static, we will not be still,
we will become winds pushing dandelions across sidewalks, we will become jokes retold with added flair, we will become reasons for tears that turn into laughter at midnight over photo albums,
we will become stories, half-true, half-legend, mostly beautiful,
we will become a rhythm someone else walks to unknowingly,
we will become shadows in old libraries and fingerprints on mugs and laughter lines in someone else’s memory of safety,
and perhaps, just perhaps, the self we tried so hard to curate and protect and define and display—
the self we typed bios for and filtered selfies for and offered apologies on behalf of—
will loosen its grip and dissolve into something freer, something vaster, something less polished and more honest,
because there is no full stop, no final page, no curtain call that is not followed by humming in the aisles or footsteps in the lobby or someone googling the name of the actor who moved them to tears,
and so we will keep becoming:
the breeze in a first kiss,
the rhythm in a lullaby hummed to a baby we never met,
the extra kindness offered because someone remembered we loved gentleness,
we will become not just ancestors, but atmospheres,
not just memory, but music,
not just history, but humanness reformed, reshaped, re-lived in hearts we never touched directly,
because even a sigh contains the ocean, and even silence echoes,
and because we are not made of ends,
we are made of echoes,
of ripples,
of transitions,
and all our endings are really translations:
of grief into gratitude,
of absence into aura,
of silence into sensation,
and maybe the body stills but the breath becomes breeze, and the thought becomes thunder, and the soul—if we dare to call it that—becomes a soft insistence that everything we loved was worth loving,
and everything we touched, even in pain, even in confusion, even in brokenness, was touched with becoming,
for we are not the book that closes,
we are the idea that continues,
we are the unfinished sentence someone else dares to complete,
we are the pause between words,
the glance across rooms,
the goosebumps in moments that defy reason,
we are here and we are not,
we are gone and yet we stay,
we are not trapped by the boundaries of breathing,
and so when the skin no longer fits, and the voice no longer calls, and the eyes no longer open,
remember this:

we do not ‘end’—
we become.

#Becoming #WeBecome #Poem #Transformation #Poetry