The Last Witness

I do not fear
that my name will one day be forgotten.

 
Names are light things.

They fade from doorbells,
from contact lists,

from conversations that begin with
"Do you remember...?"

 
What I fear

is quieter.
I fear the day

when the last person who remembers
the sound of my laughter before grief

is no longer here.
 

When no one remains
who knows why I hesitate

before that particular song,
or why the smell of rain

sometimes feels more like an apology
than a season.

Who will remember

the version of me
that only existed beside them? 

 
The child I was with my mother.
The reckless hope

I carried to an old friend.
The weary courage

I learned beside those
who saw me breaking

before I learned to call it resilience.

 
We leave pieces of ourselves
inside the people we love,

like pressed flowers
forgotten between the page

of borrowed books.

And when they leave, 

it feels less like losing them and more like losing
the only library where certain chapters of us
were ever written.

But perhaps
I have misunderstood memory.

Perhaps no one
was ever meant to hold

the whole of another soul.

Perhaps we were always

a constellation each person entrusted with only one star, 
never the entire sky.

And maybe when the last witness is gone, 

those stars do not disappear.

They simply return to the one place they belonged all along.
Not in someone else's remembering,

but in the quiet ways
their love has rewritten me.

In the kindness
I did not possess before them.

In the courage
I borrowed and never gave back.

In the silence
that no longer frightens me

because somewhere inside it
their voice still knows my name.

So if one day there is no one left who remembers
who I used to be, let it not mean that I have vanished.

Let it mean only this: that love has finally done
what love was always meant to do

to become not a story that survives, 

but a life that continues inside another.