Fragments of Cassandra

The morning after I killed myself,
the sun rose.

It came through the curtains
as though nothing had happened.

For me,
everything had stopped.

For everyone else,
morning was still morning.

My partner found the letter.

Then came the phone calls—
my name passing from person to person,
entering rooms
I would never enter again.

There were tears.

The kind that happen
when language
doesn’t know how to speak.

And still,
the dog needed breakfast.

But he didn’t wait beside his bowl—
he waited by my door.

Quiet.

As if somehow
he had understood
that the body he loved
was no longer where I lived.

The week after I killed myself,
the flowers people brought
began dying in their vases.

There was something almost honest about that.

Even the things meant to mourn me
could not stay.

People still cried.

But eventually,
someone washed the dishes.

Someone took out the trash.
Someone laughed
and immediately felt guilty for it.

That may be the strangest thing
about leaving—

you can disappear from the world
without the world disappearing with you.

The bills still come.
The grass still grows.
The milk still expires.

People still get tired
and go to sleep.

And morning,
indifferent and faithful,
keeps arriving.

Maybe we spend our whole lives
confusing being alive
with being necessary to the universe.

But the universe does not need us.

People do.

And perhaps that is more beautiful.

Months after I killed myself,
someone washed my sheets.

My car belonged to someone
who would never know
my hands once held the same steering wheel.

My clothes became boxes.

My photographs became
places people went
when they wanted to remember my face.

And slowly,
I became past tense.

Not because I mattered less,
but because time has no other direction.

My friends started finding joy again.

Because grief cannot ask someone
to stop living forever.

Coffee tasted good again.
A song made somebody dance.
Someone fell in love.

Someone saw something beautiful
and wished, for just a second,
that I could have seen it too.

Maybe this is what remains when grief grows quiet—

not always crying over what is gone,
but finding something beautiful
and instinctively turning
toward someone
who is no longer there.

My parents carried me differently.

Not forward.
Not past.
Just with them.

Some losses do not become smaller.

We simply build a life
large enough to carry them.

And somewhere,
my poetry survived me.

My words kept speaking
long after I stopped.

A stranger found them
on a night when the world
felt unbearably heavy.

Maybe they felt understood.
Maybe that was enough
for one more morning.

There is something almost cruel
about that—

to spend your whole life wondering
whether you left a mark,
only for your absence
to reveal all the places
you had already touched.

Perhaps we never get to know
the true size of our existence.

We measure ourselves
by how loudly we are loved,

while most of our meaning
lives quietly in other people.

A phrase they borrowed from us.
A song they cannot hear
without remembering.
A joke they still tell
the way we told it.

A habit they never realized
came from us.

What if immortality
was never about living forever?

small pieces of us
mistaken for pieces of someone else.

I had imagined death
as a great ending.

A final period.
A silence large enough
to swallow everything
that had ever hurt.

I think death
is much quieter than that.

One life stops.
The rest
continue.

The same moon hangs
over the same houses.

Rain gathers
in the same gutters.

Someone forgets laundry
in the washing machine.

The earth keeps turning,
as if it’s lighter now.

And that is something
I wish I had understood
before that night.

I wasn’t holding the world together—
I was simply part of it.

And maybe being part of it
was always enough.

A laugh in someone’s memory.
A name in someone’s phone.
Hair left behind
on an old sweater.

A voice someone will someday
struggle to remember exactly.

And one day,
someone will say my name
for the last time.

Not knowing
they are the last person
who ever will.

Perhaps that is the second death—
not when the heart stops,

but when the last living memory
of you does.

Because one day,
someone will think of me
for the very last time—

and neither of us
will know that it is the last.

And after that,
I will never cross another mind again.

For me,
the hurting had ended.

But nothing else had.

Life did not become
more beautiful without me.

It did not become uglier.
It simply continued—

messy,
ordinary,
unfinished.

Nothing stays,
but nothing disappears
without changing
what it leaves behind.

We are temporary,
but our absence
has a longer life than we do.

Joy leaves.
So does sorrow.

Perhaps nothing was ever meant
to stay long enough
to become permanent.

Not happiness.
Not suffering.
Not us.

The morning after I killed myself,
the sun rose.

Years later,
it still does.

Maybe that was the point—

the sun was never rising
because I was here.

It was simply rising.

And for a little while,

I was here
to see it.

Be’ahava,
The Mourning Bird