What to Carry Into the Next World
They say you can’t take anything with you.
But that’s not true.
You carry the weight of silence—the times you could have spoken, but didn’t.
You carry the way a child once reached for your hand without thinking.
You carry the quiet courage it took to keep going when no one noticed.
You carry memory—not the events, but the scent behind them.
Rain on warm pavement.
A worn-out shirt on someone you once loved.
You carry stillness.
Not calmness. Not peace.
Stillness—the kind that comes after the fire, when there’s nothing left to prove.
You carry curiosity.
The question that kept returning, even when you were tired of asking.
The wonder you didn’t outgrow.
The feeling that, somehow, this wasn’t all.
And you carry love—
not the dramatic kind that burns down cities,
but the one 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’s all they ask.
Because the soul is measured
not in achievements,
but in the innocence we held onto.