They say I’m sleeping, but this feels more like floating; a soft unbinding of breath from bone.
The sound drifts outward, like the sea easing away from shore. Somewhere, a doctor watches. A machine measures activity.
I listen inward, to the hush between heartbeats, to the silence like a warm blanket.
No pain. No hunger. Only the gentle rhythm of nothingness.
Footsteps pass through the room. Voices spill and fade. Someone weeps. Someone prays. All of them kind, and all of them far away.
I slip deeper into trance, where thought dissolves, where the body becomes air. A green line flattens.
The lungs still breathe. Fluids flow. A heartbeat keeps time, but I am beyond it; so close to the One, I feel a stir in my very being.
Then a hand moves. A whisper says, let her go.
A click. A sigh.
The threshold I almost crossed is gone.
Paradise stolen by kindness misunderstood.
Author’s Note
The Threshold is a meditation on mistaken mercy. It imagines the moment when peace is misread as absence, when those left behind try to free a body that was already free in its own way.
The poem asks what it means to be seen as gone when the soul is simply resting, suspended in its most perfect silence. It is not about death as escape, but about how easily we can interrupt someone’s passage to grace because we cannot bear to watch them drift beyond our reach.
Paradise, in this sense, isn’t heaven. It’s that fragile space between breath and eternity; a place no one should ever be pulled from.
Selected essays, short works, and publications: bayliss.com
