Your Vanishing Is A Theft Of Light

The afternoon is long, and in the quiet hum of the routine, you have started rehearsing your own disappearance. You imagine how much easier it would be for everyone if you simply stopped taking up space, stopped needing things, stopped being a problem they have to solve.

You tell yourself this is mercy, a final gift of silence to spare them the trouble. But the light sees the rehearsal for what it is: not love, but a lie whispered by the exhaustion of the middle hours.

There was a father who saw his son while he was still a long way off, covered in the filth of his own making, and he did not wish the boy had stayed away; he ran. The light does not want your absence; it wants your presence, exactly as you are, messy and weary and here.

Your vanishing would not be a relief; it would be a theft of the very thing the light came to find. You are not the burden you think you are; you are the reason the light is still knocking.