9999 Epilogue: Silence, Finally

from Three Moons in My Ribcage

No ending comes with thunder.
Not the real ones.
They arrive quiet. Barefoot. Unblinking.
They slip in when you stop looking for shape
and find comfort in the blur.

There is no audience now.
No ritual. No closing act.
Only a field.
And a ribcage hanging from a crooked tree
like a windchime built from memory.
Mine.
Or someone I used to be.
It no longer matters.

I do not speak here.
I do not write.
I do not think.
There are no questions left to ask.
Only air.
Only distance.
Only the faint hum of something ancient
exhaling for the first time in centuries.

The moons are gone.
Or they are still here.
But they have gone quiet.
Not because they are finished,
but because I no longer resist.
And without resistance,
there is no sound.

This is not peace.
It is not defeat.
It is not survival.
It is the part of the story
where the storyteller walks away
and leaves the fire burning behind him.

A child’s shoe lies half-buried in the dust.
The laces undone.
The sole cracked.
It does not belong to anyone now.
It is an artefact.
A relic of a world
where I once thought I was supposed to be human.

I step over it.
I do not look back.
I do not need to.

The sky is empty.
The earth is clean.
And for the first time,
I hear nothing.

Not silence as absence.
Silence as completion.
Silence as the final language
for things too sacred to name.

I walk on.
Not toward anything.
Just away.
And the ground does not question me.
The wind does not beg for answers.
The story does not restart.

It ends.
Like this.
Exactly like this.