Words I'll Never Hear

Dec 18, 2025

Death, for me, looks exactly like it sounds: Death.

Final and blunt.

No words, no sound, no feeling.

Nothingness.

It wasn’t always like this, though.

When I was younger, I imagined death as light; soft, warm rays cutting through a dark, unending space. This was when I was deep in my faith and was probably what I thought heaven or forever looked like.

Over time, as my faith thinned, the light grew smaller and smaller, and now I'm stuck with whatever KPLC gives out so faithfully, an inconvenient darkness.

I think I’m fine with that.

What unsettles me most is the silence.

The idea or thought that I won’t get the chance to listen to the voice that says my name for the last time, watch their face, and feel the emotions that the word comes with.

I’ll never listen to my eulogy, and the words my loved ones (or a bot they named Andy) took time to write for me, the words they’ll use to gloss me over, and make me easier to remember.

Once, I asked my friend to write what she would say when I died, and I’d do the same for her.

We were on our rooftop basking in the sun, eating some smokies.

“We are going to die anyway,” I tried. “Why not let me go, having heard the last words you’d have said to me? We might both lie a little more, but who cares?”

She gave me a weird look, shook her head so hard I was half waiting for it to fall off, and sternly brushed me off, saying I was somehow hastening my death, and it would come sooner than it should have that way.

I dropped it. But I don’t know.

I’ve always thought that if you were meant to die yesterday, you would have, and if you were meant to die tomorrow, you will, even if you do everything right today. Hence, the bizarre survival stories and sudden, unexpected deaths.

I know it’s a senseless logic that falls apart the moment you tag at it, but it comforts me.

Please wear your seatbelts…

Maybe this is coming from a place of not being in control. Death refuses schedules, so I try to control everything else around it. I remember sending the same friend a TikTok on how I wanted my coffin to look.

She must be tired of me.

I’m tired of me, too.

I had hoped to conclude this differently, on some note of divine acceptance or wisdom.

But I can’t.

So come fight me.

I’ve written about death before, and I brood over it more than I’d like, but it can’t be helped. It’s bound to find me.