Impermanence

There’s a moment, right before something disappears, when it shines the brightest.

A sunset seconds before the horizon swallows it — and you already feel the loss in your bones before the sky admits it’s over.

A candle flaring before it drowns in its own wax — the flame trembling as though it knows its life is being counted down in heartbeats.

The last deep breath you take before stepping into cold water — knowing warmth will be stripped from you and never fully given back.

People are no different.

We like to believe endings arrive suddenly — with the drama of a slammed door, the weight of a final word, the cinematic grace of a clean break. But more often, they seep in quietly. They begin the day you stop answering with the same energy you receive. They begin in the hesitation before you type a reply. They begin in the unread messages you promise yourself you’ll answer later. They begin in the way “soon” slowly becomes “never” and neither of you bothers to notice — because noticing would mean facing the truth: you’ve already started losing each other.

The drift is always gentler than we expect, until suddenly it isn’t. Until one day, the thread snaps.

No sound, no warning — just absence.

No shared coffee on a Sunday morning, only the silence of an empty chair.

No lazy arguments about music, movies, or where to order dinner from — only the kind of quiet that doesn’t feel peaceful.

Just a hollow where something used to live, a hollow you try to ignore but feel in every breath.

You’ll make your case in the courtroom of your own mind. You’ll tell yourself they could have stayed if they truly wanted to. They’ll tell themselves you could have asked them to. Maybe you’re both right. Maybe you’re both wrong. The truth is, the universe doesn’t stop to mediate human misunderstandings. It keeps turning. It scatters people like loose change in the pocket of time, slipping through seams too worn to hold anything permanent — and you’re left counting what’s missing instead of what’s left.

It’s rarely about who cared more, or who let go first. It’s about how every connection — no matter how strong, how consuming — is on borrowed time. Every person you meet is already on their way to becoming someone you used to know. The expiry date isn’t printed anywhere, but it’s there. Written in the small moments you didn’t think mattered — until they became the only ones you could remember.

Some nights, you’ll still feel them. Not in the loud, cinematic way of longing, but in the sudden, ambush moments:

A stranger’s laugh that mimics theirs just enough to turn your stomach.

The way your name once sounded softer in their voice, now a sound you’d barter anything to hear again.

A song you skipped for months but accidentally let play, only to realize halfway through that your hands are shaking.

It’s not nostalgia for them exactly, but for the version of yourself that only existed in their presence — the version that felt less fractured. You’ll want to reach for that self, but they don’t live here anymore. And maybe neither do you.

And maybe — though it feels like betrayal to admit it — that’s the point. Some people aren’t meant to be kept. They’re meant to be weather systems: passing through, reshaping your internal landscape, and moving on. They leave fingerprints, not roots. Imprints, not foundations.

We spend so much of our lives trying to preserve what was never ours in the first place. But nothing in the natural world holds forever. Not the tide. Not the light. Not even us. And the more we clutch at what’s slipping, the deeper it cuts on the way out.

So you learn. You learn to open your hand instead of closing your fist. You learn to let the current move through you, to feel it without trying to trap it in place. You hold the warmth while it’s there, knowing it will fade — and when it does, you don’t stop it, even as it hollows you.

Because some truths are final. Some endings are absolute. And grief, no matter how much it softens over years, never truly becomes gratitude — it only learns to hide better.

One day, you will walk past the place where it all began — maybe a street, maybe a doorway, maybe just the corner of a park bench — and you’ll expect it to crush you the way it used to. It won’t. That will hurt more than anything.

Because some truths are final. Some endings are absolute. And grief, no matter how much it softens over years, never truly becomes gratitude — it only learns to hide better.

In the end, you realize this isn’t just about you, or them, or the small story you thought you were writing together. It’s about the way everything — stars, oceans, cities, love — is built to vanish. Not because it failed, but because impermanence is the only law the universe has ever obeyed. And just like the light from a dead star still crossing the sky, some connections outlive their time not by staying, but by fading slowly enough for you to notice.