Fifteen lucid memories sit in the audience, watching a hundred others I can’t place. I arrive late, time zones slipping through me like water, but it hardly matters. I am only a gesture in the pantomime, a small motion mistaken for presence. My story never strobed in neon the way I imagined it should. Wisdom came not from holding tight, but from learning to end things—not by slamming doors, but by handing them the shovel and letting them bury themselves. I have always lived like a curator of the small. My body is a penthouse suite of sentiment: each room furnished with relics; a crooked laugh, some stranger’s kindness I never forgot. Memory is greedy, though. Collecting everything doesn’t enlarge the self; it builds an illusion of space. I became something closer to grandeur the moment I began to pare down. Constriction taught me expansion. My shrinking made me wider. This paradox… is it grace?
There is room tonight. A bunk bed in the basement, sheets folded, waiting. I have made peace with the waves beneath me. The old fears still surface, still break—but I sit with them as if they were guests. The left side of my brain insists it is a mirage. Still, I stay. I have always loved the architecture of nothing: the way attention drafts a floor plan from absence. Faith in that emptiness is enough; the weight of intention settles in my chest like a promise. The pragmatic half of me finds levity in sadness, as though grief were raw material waiting to be poured into song. And so I sing. In this imagined chorus, I attend my own funeral, livestreamed. Comments scroll like votive candles. Most are kind. A few misspell my name. I wish I had lived long enough to share my story rather than like it. My aunt’s hands tremble as she taps the heart emoji. It feels less like mourning and more like a post-fire, an ember glowing in the wreckage; a digital renaissance of ghosts.
Don’t weep for what you cannot hold. All fruit falls eventually. I learned this watching you live like a pear tree—sweetness spilling without ceremony. Before our skin was tilled, before memory lodged itself like a stone in an untilled field, I had questions—small ones, sharp as whetstones at dawn. Time dulled their scrape, softened them into ivy curling quietly over your cheek. So let’s postpone the past. Post a selfie, even if it is selfish. Enjoy this: a thousand views, the sea, the sky, the see-ahead. The ache of almost. The fun of not yet. This crowded life, these many rooms, each echoing with the footfall of former selves. Some nights, I believe we are all waiting to be unearthed—by golden embers in someone’s eyes, by the hush of a listener long after the speaker has gone. Maybe that, too, is a way to remain.