Work Text:
A star does not simply vanish
it labors first,
burning through its own brilliance,
fusing light from the raw dark,
until the core grows tired of holding itself together.
Gravity, patient and absolute,
waits for that moment of exhaustion.
Then, without malice,
it pulls inward
a quiet collapse,
a folding of fire into silence.
Or sometimes,
the ending is louder
a violent unmaking,
a supernova that tears the sky open,
scattering what it once was
across the stoic void.
We look at people and expect them to shine,
steady and warm,
predictable as daylight.
When they dim,
we call it weakness.
When they cannot rise,
we name it laziness.
We do not see the fuel running out,
thoughts burning any chance of hope.
We don’t sense the depersonalisation,
or the frayed connections inside.
We do not feel the weight
pressing inward on their chest,
the quiet gravity
tightening its grip.
Instead, we see fragments
unread text's,
unfinished work,
energy that flickers and disappears
and we mistake the pattern
for carelessness.
But depression is not emptiness.
It is pressure.
It is a star at the end of its burning,
its core collapsing under forces
it can no longer resist.
Some implode silently,
folding inward,
their light swallowed so completely
it seems like nothing is there at all.
Others explode
thoughts scattering like cosmic debris,
emotions flaring too bright, too sudden
a supernova of chaos
disconnected from oneself
wholly disjointed
But both are endings of the same kind:
not failure,
not weakness,
but exhaustion
under unbearable weight.
And somewhere in that collapse,
in that breaking apart or caving in,
there is still the truth
that once,
there was light.