The Sound of Inevitability

Death has arrived knuckles grazing the glass windows, it has all the time we do not. Don’t answer when it taps. Don’t answer. It’s knocking persists again again a metronome stitched to dread, measuring the distance between breath and surrender. Do you hear it? that clinging insistence, like grief taught manners— like something that once loved you, but has since forgotten how. Don’t answer! no, do not dignify it with motion for doors are confessions, and hinges betray what the heart has attempted to barricade. It waits oh, it waits with a scholar’s devotion, cataloguing silence, finding scripture in the pause between each refusal. And I shrink into the marrow of the room, counting each second as a mercy that might yet rescind itself. I feel something within me stir, A buried fragment already gone to greet it. You didn’t listen. You stepped into it, despite my pleading and I kept believing distance was only a string in retreat, drawn taut enough to lead you to me. Death will not break It persuades. It remembers. And God— how it remembers us.