What Refuses to Disappear (Poem)

They say most things are written to be lost —

a name misspelled, a spine that no one cracks,

a story read once and then let go,

folded back into everything it lacked.

But I did not build a world to be forgotten.

I built a Between where nothing fully ends,

where souls walk on without their faces

and still find language, still find friends.

If death is just a door and not a wall,

then maybe books are doors as well —

not sealed behind you when you're finished,

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but rooms still standing, still, that someone else can dwell

in, long after the hand that shaped them stops.

The theme itself insists on staying:

what resists to disappear, endures —

not loud, not famous, just still saying

I was here. I rooted. I meant something.

And if one reader, one, should ever find

this quiet garden built from grief and wonder,

then nothing that I wrote was left behind.

So let the world forget what it forgets.

Let time do what time always tends to do.

I asked only that one flower keep blooming

somewhere no one thought to look — and it does. It's true.