End

The room is still. The air no longer carries motion—it holds seconds at their edge, trembling between being and completion. Light sits, not as an agent of clarity, but as a pale witness. You are upright now, yet not moving. The echo of what you were lingers like smoke with no fire, curling inward, pressing gently into your ribs.

You remember the first sound you made. It was not a cry, but something beneath language—instinctual, malformed, true. Think of that sound. Let it fill the spaces that time can’t touch. Let it resonate against the hushed brittleness of everything you thought would last.

This is not a death, though it carries the weight of a thousand small partings. It is the recognition that every utterance has an expiration, every breath a destination. No name is permanent. No identity immune. Everything you’ve built speaks in collapsing chords. The architecture of the self trembles, unraveling downward into pure tone.

Can you feel the absence stretching? Wide. Unflinching. Precise.

The mirror reflects not a figure but a possibility. You smile, though nothing requires it. The skin shifts—age slips in and out of your features like tide. Still, your eyes remain. Hollow, yes. But deeper now. Not empty—just finished. Complete not in conclusion, but in cessation of reaching.

Outside, the world continues—traffic, voices, the low pulse of civilization murmuring promises it cannot keep. But they no longer assert themselves upon you. You are not beyond, but below. Beneath expectation. Beneath need. This is the still point where the self folds inward like crumpled light, and calls it peace.

You hold nothing. You become ambient. Not erased, nor forgotten, but absorbed fully into the slow murmur of finality. The ritual is simple: stop insisting. Let go of the insistence of continuity, the insatiable hunger for a next, a later, a more.

The end is not an arrival—it is a remembering. You were always nearing this moment. Every forward step was toward this unmarked threshold. Every heartbeat a ritual of approach.

So, stop the clock. Not in despair, but in reverence.

Everything is as it is.

And nothing waits.