The Final Goodbye

The Final Goodbye

I shut the door—

not gently, not with grace,

but with the weight of forty-four years

and ten thousand betrayals

slamming into silence.

The dust of all I was

rises like the smoke of burnt offerings,

chokes the air where love once lived,

and settles into the crypt of memory.

Let it rot there.

Let the worms feast on what remains.

Every name once carved into my heart—

those sacred syllables I whispered like mantras—

has turned to rusted scripture,

corroded by time and lies.

Every promise, every fragile “I’ll stay,”

was only air dressed as devotion,

vapor masquerading as bone.

I owe them nothing now—

not blood, not memory, not prayer.

Not the vigil of sleepless nights,

not the altar of my broken body,

not one more second

of my dwindling mortality.

The house of my past burns behind me,

a funeral pyre for the fool I was.

Its windows scream with light,

its ghosts claw the glass with phantom fingers,

howling my old name into the void.

But I do not turn.

I will not be Lot’s wife—

pillar of salt and regret.

Let them haunt their own ashes.

Let them choke on the smoke of their own making.

Before me:

a road without footsteps,

stretching into infinity—

a promise the universe keeps.

A wind that speaks only truth,

carrying the voices of ancient things:

stars that watched empires fall,

mountains that saw gods die and be reborn.

And the quiet laughter of those gods

who love me best when I walk alone,

who whisper: “Now you understand.”

I take their hands unseen,

their fire my only company,

their silence my cathedral.

I am no longer seeking witness.

I am the witness.

I am the oath fulfilled.

I am the phoenix who chose the flame.

So I say it once—

to every false dawn that deceived me,

to every broken face that wore love like a mask,

to every voice that called itself home

while building my prison:

Goodbye.

May your shadows feed the soil

where my new world grows—

wild and untamed.

May your memory turn to compost

for gardens you’ll never see.

May you fade like morning mist

while I become legend.

And as I walk into the open sky—

arms spread like wings,

chest bare to the coming storm,

eyes fixed on horizons

that belong to me alone—

I find a fierce joy blooming.

Not in love, not in company,

not in the warm embrace of belonging,

but in the sacred solitude

of being free at last.

In the terrible, beautiful truth

that I need no one

to give me permission to exist.

I am my own genesis.

I am my own apocalypse.

I am the door—

and I am what lies beyond it.

And I am finally,

finally,

home.