afraid of death
One day I will die.
The birds will keep flying. The trains and buses will still run on schedule. Somewhere a company will hold its stand-up at nine sharp. Dolphins will keep swimming. Lions will still roar across the plains of Africa. The people I love, the ones I think I could not live without, will forget me and fill the space I left with something else. For some it will hurt for years. For others it won't register as a loss at all.
Eventually everyone moves on. The world moves on. Then, one by one, the people who loved me will die too. Then the last person who ever knew my name will die. And after that, no one will say my name again. No one will know I was ever here.
My presence means nothing against the size of the universe. I've decided that's a gift, not a wound. It means the weight I've carried on my shoulders for ten years was never real weight at all. Every ambition, every want I've chased, none of it matters the way I thought it did. Building wealth for a future I might not live to see is a bet I don't need to keep making.
What matters is this hour, this breath, this table I'm sitting at right now. The past is, and ink is dry. Nothing to be done about a single line of it. The future hasn't happened and worrying won't write it faster. Live the life that's actually yours, on terms you chose, so completely that death finds nothing left unlived.
But there's no walking out of this alive. You can lift weights until your joints give out, run until your lungs burn, eat only what grows from the ground, keep your mind still as a monk's. None of it changes the ending. The most any of it buys you is time, and the only real choice you get is what you do with the time you're given. Death isn't something you outrun.
The sooner that lands, the lighter everything gets.
So what am I actually afraid of losing? My life? Or what happens after it ends? I think it's the second one.
If it all got taken from me today, I'd survive it. I'd grieve the party ending early, but that loss isn't what keeps me up. What keeps me up is the fear of not having done enough before I get there. The fear of standing in front of Allah with every stupid, careless thing I've done laid bare, no excuse left to give, no way to talk my way around it. Just consequences, plain and unavoidable. That's the part that actually scares me.
The answer is getting closer to Allah. Doing what's right. Staying close to my own soul instead of drifting from it. Moving slow enough to actually notice this life instead of racing through it, and careful enough not to leave a trail of harm behind me. If I can manage that, I don't need a glorious life. I just need one I can stand behind when it's over.