Walking Toward You

We’ll meet one day,
not as enemies sworn since birth,
but as two old companions
who were always walking toward each other
from opposite ends of the same road.

You’ve been patient, Death, I’ll give you that.
You never rush,
never knock too loudly.
You wait at the edge of rooms,
leaning against the wall of time
like someone who knows
their turn will come.

Between now and then
I will die many times.

Not the loud death
with fire and mourning,
the quieter kinds
you understand best.

The death of a dream
when it is folded carefully
and placed inside responsibility.

The death that happens
under office lights at 9 am.,
when a person trades the wild sky
for spreadsheets and routine,
and a small bird inside the chest
stops singing.

The death of the poet
who stopped writing
because bills are louder than rhymes.

The death that comes
when you learn to be practical.

Friendships die too.
Not with explosions,
but with silence.
A message left unread.
A call postponed.
Two people waiting for the other
to care first.

And some die
because a stranger whispers poison
into familiar ears,
someone who arrived yesterday
somehow rewrites aeons of love
in a single afternoon.

Families break this way.
Not like earthquakes.
More like slow rot in the wood.

And sometimes the death begins early,
when parents try to live their lost dreams
through their children’s lives,
then later swear
it never happened.

That kind of death
leaves no grave.
Just an empty chair
in the house of memory.
You watch people leave
one by one,
friends, dreams, versions of yourself,
until your chest becomes
a quiet cemetery
where laughter once lived.


You know this well,
don’t you?
You’ve been counting.
Yet I keep walking.
Through the small funerals of living,
through abandoned hopes
and half-healed rooms of the heart.

But when we finally meet,
you and I,
I hope, even after all these small deaths,
you still find me alive.