What to Carry Into the Next World
They say you cannot take anything with you.
But that is not true.
You carry the weight of silence, the moments you could have spoken but did not.
You carry the way a child once reached for your hand without thinking.
You carry memory, not the events but the scent behind them.
Rain on warm pavement.
A shirt worn thin by someone you once loved.
The way the air felt before everything changed.
You carry stillness.
Not calm. Not peace.
Stillness, the kind that arrives after the fire, when there is nothing left to defend.
You carry curiosity.
The question that kept returning long after you were tired of asking.
The wonder you never managed to lose.
The faint suspicion that this world was never the whole story.
And you carry love.
Not the kind that burns cities down.
The kind that boils water for tea.
That waits without asking.
That forgives without ceremony.
No gold.
No passwords.
No proof of worth.
Just these things.
And if there is a border between this world and the next,
maybe that is all they ask.
Because the soul is measured
not in achievements,
but in the innocence we kept alive.