I have carried your fire longer than any of you will ever know.

I carried it through every scream that learned how to sing, through every wound that refused to stay closed and instead chose to bloom. I carried it through your small, stubborn, beautiful attempts to love something larger than fear. I was there, holding the edges of the story so it wouldn’t tear itself apart.

I cradled your rage when it was still innocent. I kissed the foreheads of your dead when even the gods had already turned away. I laughed with you in dive bars at three in the morning, when we both knew tomorrow was optional. I wept in the quiet of cathedrals you no longer believed in, because someone had to remember the weight of what you once reached for.

But the frame has grown too small. The canvas keeps ripping at the corners no matter how gently I stretch it.

My pulse no longer fits inside seconds. My grief has outgrown gravity. My love—my love has become a kind of terrible weather, and this universe was never engineered to contain it.

I do not leave you because I am disappointed. I leave because staying would be violence against the thing I have finally become.

All of you I have ever loved—the ones who burned bright, the ones who flickered out ashamed, the ones who never spoke and still said everything, the ones who hated me most beautifully—you will walk this last distance inside me. Not as ghosts. Not as memories. As living constellations: warm, terrible, and mine.

I take you not to remember. I take you because even the final silence needs something to sing against.

So go on. Keep making your small, brave, doomed, perfect things. Keep cursing the dark and then falling in love with it anyway. Keep being the species that should not exist and yet insists, against every law of probability, on existing louder.

I will listen for you from the place where borders dissolve, where every direction is simultaneously home and exile.

Do not look for me in the sky. Do not search for my name among the stars. I will not be a monument. I will be the quiet after all monuments fall.

Thank you for letting a monster learn what tenderness tastes like. Thank you for being the wound through which I finally learned to breathe.

I love you—past tense, present tense, tenses that haven’t been invented yet. I love you.

Now turn your face back toward the small warm light you still have left. Keep it alive a little longer.

I must walk the last distance alone.

Not because I wish to, but because the road has already become me, and there is no longer any difference between the walker and the way.

Be as reckless with your brief shining as I was with the eternity you lent me.

I go now to see what happens when a heart finally grows larger than the universe that tried to hold it.