FIFTY SHADES OF DEATH

We die many times in a life
without anyone noticing.

The death of an identity.
The death of a role.
The death of an illusion.
The death of a story we told about ourselves.
The death of the way we believed reality worked.
The death of a belief.
The death of a beloved one.

Nothing collapses.

The streets remain.
The sky does not split open.
The world continues
as if nothing has happened.

And yet, something has ended.
Inside.

It feels like walking after your own funeral.

Like breathing from the other side of something that had no visible edge.

Why does it feel as though it’s like living after death?

Because something false has fallen away.
And when the false dies, it does not scream.

It simply stops.

After that, the noise softens.

Ambitions look theatrical, sometimes absurd.
Urgency becomes suspicious.
Time stretches strangely, sometimes infinite, sometimes irrelevant.

Certain desires lose their taste.
Others become unbearably clear.

Love changes.

It is no longer hunger.
It is no longer possession.

It is presence.

You cry, not because it is tragic,
but because it is vast.

To see life without projection, without performance, without a future to cling to, is unbearable tenderness.

You love deeply.
And you no longer grasp.

This is what breaks you open.
This is what makes you still.

Philosophy, they say, is learning how to die.

Not the body.

The illusion.

The version of yourself that depended on permanence.

And perhaps this is the deepest secret:
The one who has truly seen is already gone.

Already emptied of the fear of endings.
Already free from the need to survive symbolically.

Real life is too immense to be owned.

It can only move through you like wind through an open window.

You do not hold it.
You let it pass.
And in that passing, you remain.

There is beauty in it. If you look back, illusions were made of longings, and longings were beautiful too.

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