I have loved stars that collapsed into themselves. People who once burned with the kind of brilliance that made you believe in something bigger—something divine. They carried light in their hands, in their words, in the way they saw the world with wild, unfiltered wonder. But like Icarus, like Lucifer, like every fallen thing that ever thought itself untouchable, they flew too high, reached too far, believed themselves invincible.

The best is not behind you. The best is not in the hands you have already let go of, in the love that has already left, in the dreams that have already withered. The best is ahead, waiting for you to stop gripping the bones of something long dead.

The world is uncomfortable with what it cannot see. We are taught to rally against cancer, to wage wars on failing organs, but we do not know how to hold space for the quiet, interior battles. We turn away from suffering that does not bleed, does not show itself in scars and statistics. And yet, pain is pain. It does not lessen because it is unseen.

My heart is dying, but not in the romantic way. Not in the way they write about in poems. It is shriveling, it is gasping, it is clenched so tight it cannot beat properly. They tell me the name for it—stress cardiomyopathy—so neat, so clinical. A heart giving up, not from clots or cholesterol, but from grief, from strain, from the sheer unbearable weight of being alive.