I did not ask to stand in light,
nor walk the stage, nor speak my lines.
Yet here I am—through fault, through fight,
through twenty years of measured time.

The script is looped, the plot is stale,
the exits marked in hollow lead.
To fight is folly, frail, and fraught,
to fold is merely left unsaid.

No gods to beg, no fate to barter,
no judge to weigh what I have spent.
I claim this act, its ink, its end,
I take the bow, the stage is bent.

And still—the show will stagger on,
past hollow men and empty breath.
But I was here, and let it stand,
this ending was my own to set.