The Unmaking
A poem about final moments, regret, and the silence that follows
The Unmaking
The body stills —
a vessel surrendering to its final quiet —
yet something stirs:
a hand lifting toward the empty air,
as though answering
a presence no one else could see.
The fingers close on nothing,
the gesture suspended
between fading instinct
and the pull of an unseen horizon.
A breath.
A pause.
Another breath.
Another pause.
Then the long, final stillness
that marks the boundary
no one returns from.
One eye opens,
clouded, unseeing,
searching the dark with a gaze
already half‑gone.
Awareness drifts free,
a dim ember falling
through a realm without horizon.
No warmth.
No witness.
Only the slow descent
into the vast, airless gulf
older than stars.
Memory loosens.
Regret drifts through the void —
not for wounds inflicted,
but for the long absences
that calcified into years,
for the words withheld
until they became impossible to speak.
For a moment —
thin as a dying ember —
there is the faint impression
of something understood too late,
a recognition forming
only as the self begins to unravel.
It flickers once,
cold and colourless,
before the dark consumes it.
Too late.
The truth settles like frost
on the fading spark:
no path remains open,
no voice can reach back,
no gesture can be made.
The cosmos does not stir.
It offers neither mercy
nor remembrance —
only the ancient indifference
of a universe untroubled
by the extinguishing of a single mind.
The ember thins,
drawn downward
into perfect nothingness.
It unravels,
dissolves,
falls.
And then —
at the very brink of erasure —
a tremor moves through the dark.
Faint.
Uncertain.
A pressure, like a breath,
or the echo of a door
opening somewhere beyond sight.
No light forms.
No voice calls.
Yet the void,
for a single heartbeat of eternity,
is not entirely still.
A warmth too slight to trust,
a presence too distant to name,
brushes the fading spark
as it slips into the deep.
Whether it was real,
or only the last dream of a dying mind,
cannot be known.
But in the vast, indifferent dark,
something stirs —
and the nothingness
is no longer complete.
Until Next time.