You don’t notice it at first.
Not really.
Life keeps you busy with noise, with dreams, with the next thing.

But then one day,
you cross an invisible threshold.
There’s no signpost, no celebration
just the quiet erosion of what once mattered.

The body falters first.
Not dramatically - no, it’s more insidious than that.
You wake up sore from sleep.
You get winded climbing stairs you once ran.
You start measuring your days in energy, not hours.

Then come the dreams
the ones you clung to like anchors.
They begin to dissolve.
Some shrink into hobbies, others vanish with a sigh.
And the ones that remain?
Too fragile to chase, too old to birth.

Your beliefs shift too.
Not because they were wrong,
but because the world keeps insisting you make room for things
you once swore you’d never tolerate.

You adjust.
You settle.
You survive.

But the worst part
the part no one warns you about
is the people.

One by one,
they begin to leave.

Some give you time.
They let you prepare your goodbye.
Others vanish mid-conversation,
leaving cups half full and promises unfinished.

And what’s cruel is not just that they’re gone
it’s that nothing fills their space.
You try.
You pretend.
You build new connections like patchwork quilts.
But nothing fits quite right.

Because love, real love, isn’t replaced.
It’s carried
as ache,
as memory,
as absence you learn to walk around like a piece of furniture in the dark.

You keep going, of course.
What else can you do?
You make tea.
You water the plants.
You smile at strangers and nod at the sky like it still owes you something.

But deep down, you know:
This is what it means to age
not the wrinkles, not the gray.
It’s the slow, silent disappearing
of everything that once made you feel
alive.

I never forgave my twin brother
for abandoning me
for six minutes in our mother’s womb,
leaving me there alone,
terrified in the dark,
floating like an astronaut in that silent space,
while kisses rained down on him from the other side.

Those were the longest six minutes of my life
the minutes that made him the firstborn,
the favored one.

Ever since, I raced to be first:
out of the room,
out of the house,
to school,
to the cinema
even if it meant missing the end of the movie.

Then one day, I got distracted,
and he stepped out to the street before me.
Smiling that gentle smile,
he was struck by a car.

I remember my mother
how she rushed from the house
at the sound of the impact,
how she passed by me,
arms outstretched toward his lifeless body,
but she screamed my name.

To this day,
I’ve never corrected her mistake.

It was I who died,
and he who lived.