Last Conversation

I hear you speak through a dreamy haze, as your words float across space unable to penetrate my energy field. My gut already knows: this is our last conversation.

I sip my coffee slowly, watching steam rise and blur my vision while my intuition draws a straight line across my chest like an ECG monitor telling me; It’s over. This connection is gone, and no breath will revive it.

I sit with you in the present, but you are already in my past. It is hard to endure last conversations when nature has already whispered; "It's ending" to me. You go on speaking, unaware of the signs that buzz like bees all around me. I hear birds somewhere outside, their songs louder than your words, as if they are carrying the message you refuse to hear. Between your sentences, I hear lilies closing in a garden where we once planted our hopes.

I wonder if you will keep watering that dead plant, still faithful to a hollow stem. We planted so many seeds — little rituals, silly jokes, long conversations. My soul, though, was the first to know. It caught the wilt. It left before either of us could admit the truth.

I used to try with a pocket knife, sawing slowly, dragging out the farewell. But that is cruelty. It creates a wound that never closes. So now I take the axe — swift, merciful, clean. For a clean cut is more honorable than a slow unraveling. A quick ending is a mercy.

And yet, I hear you speak. I nod, sip, breathe. I do the whole ritual as my spirit is shifting to another timeline leaving you behind. I let you finish. Even when my soul is already gone, I cannot be unkind to the moment we still share.

When I leave, I leave quietly but abruptly. I step out of your universe and cut all the little threads that once tied our worlds together. I no longer wander that ancient garden.

And yet today, walking through another garden alive with lilies, filled with the bright scatter of birds and the echo of children’s laughter, I wondered about all the gardens I left behind — what became of them? And whether their owners still remember me? Did they leave too? What happened to the liliies and the birds?

Maybe that’s what love really is: to stay until the last syllable.