reading room
The End
When does the world end? Today, tomorrow, or in a hundred years? Does it vanish with the headlines, or dissolve quietly in the pause between two people who have nothing left to say?
Maybe the end isn't fire, or floods, or sirens screaming. Maybe it's the empty seat at the table, the unanswered all, the weight of saying "I'm fine" when you haven't been for weeks.
Perhaps the world ends not with chaos, but with silence— the long kind, the kind that hums in the corners of a room you forgot was once full.
We think of endings as sudden, but some creep in like loneliness in a crowded room. Like talking and not being heard. Like sleeping beside someone who feels a thousand miles away.
Does the world end when no one remembers your laugh? When the stars look down and see no one looking back?
Maybe it's ending now— in text bubbles that vanish, in voices left on read, in the quiet click of a door you closed behind yourself.
I wonder if anyone will notice when the last word goes unwritten, when the last hand reaches out and finds only air.
And if it ends while I'm still writing, still hoping, still waiting— let this poem be the echo of someone who was here. Someone who asked if anyone else felt alone, too.
— Lilith