Your Inevitable Demise

Maybe you were supposed to die, just maybe.

Not peacefully. Not old and warm beneath clean sheets surrounded by softened memories.

No —

perhaps your body was always destined to become a ruin.

A cathedral of rotting meat slowly surrendering itself to fungus, fever, and time.

Perhaps every breath you take is only borrowed air passing through lungs already rehearsing their collapse.

Your veins carry more than blood. They carry inheritance: disease, deterioration, the patient architecture of decay.

Inside you, cells divide with the blind hunger of pests. Teeth weaken. Skin loosens. Organs quietly negotiate mutiny in the dark.

And all around you, the world feasts.

Mold creeps through forgotten corners. Maggots wait beneath soil with priest-like patience. Rust consumes iron. Salt devours stone. Even the stars themselves rot outward into silence.

What made you think you were exempt?

One day your name will become a sound no one bothers to pronounce correctly. Your photographs will yellow like infected wounds. Your messages will sit unopened inside dead servers humming in dust-filled rooms.

And eventually, even your bones — those proud white monuments beneath your flesh — will soften, crack, and vanish into anonymous earth.

The worms will not know your ambitions. The dirt will not care who loved you. Decay is profoundly democratic.

Still, you continue.

You perfume the body that is betraying you. You decorate the cage. You speak of "later" as though your spine is not already counting downward.

Humanity is grotesque like that.

A species fully aware of its own expiration yet arrogant enough to dream anyway.

And maybe that is the real pestilence: hope.

That stubborn, infected thing crawling through dying creatures convincing them to plant gardens at the edge of the grave.