She had always wanted to let go,
to feel the fading of her tired heart,
lie down and just accept the inevitable.
Some called it an unhealthy obsession
to think about mortality regularly,
but she accepted the fact and she was happy,
under no delusions that she would live forever.
Just.
Let.
Go.
Three words that could devastate a mind.

She philosophised about the beyond,
contemplated an afterlife or nothing.
There seemed to have been no beforelife
that she or anyone else could recall,
so what chance was there of something after?
Life wasn’t a circle, it was a spiral,
and we were always spiralling down,
and when we reached the bottom,
well, you slide right off the end into non-existence.
No fanfare of trumpets, no felicitating light,
just the cold termination of time.

Her spiral was shorter than it should have been,
some cosmic joke that always gets played
on the smart and not the dumb.
This universe doesn’t seem to do balance,
more stupid people than clever,
more dark matter than physical,
more space out there and not enough here.
So the universe had to set her free
and not a day goes by I don’t miss her.
I asked her where I was on my spiral
but she never gave me an answer,
instead, a little look of knowing
that could never be read.

I hope she was wrong
and she waits at the foot of my spiral
to catch me when I slip and slide away.