I haven’t written in almost two months.
Not because I didn’t want to.
Not because I ran out of ideas.
Life simply pulled me somewhere deeper.
Somewhere heavier.
Lately, my days have been surrounded by history. Old documents. Photographs. Identification papers. Handwritten letters from people who no longer exist in the physical world. I’ve spent hours carefully translating faded ink from another era, staring at signatures written by hands that turned to dust decades ago.
And something about that changes you.
You stop seeing history as dates.
It becomes breathing evidence that every human being who walks this Earth believes, even subconsciously, that they still have time.
Until suddenly they don’t.
The strange thing is… the more time I spend around death, the less afraid of it I seem to become.
Not because I understand it.
But because I’m beginning to suspect that death may not function the way we think it does.
A few weeks ago, I sat alone at a desk translating an old document. It was ordinary at first glance. Official stamps. Numbers. Foreign words. The usual.
But then I noticed the birthdate.
Then the transport date.
Then the age.
Nineteen years old.
Nineteen.
I remember just sitting there staring at the paper for a moment longer than usual. Because suddenly this wasn’t “history”...
