The Elsewhere
They say we go somewhere.
But what if it’s not a place,
but a punctuation—
a semicolon curled at the edge of time,
where breath pauses,
but the sentence still hums?
What if death is not an ending,
but a translation—
from body to breeze,
from skin to stardust,
from heartbeat to humming in the walls
of a universe too polite to forget us?
Maybe we don’t go up or down.
Maybe we go sideways,
slipping into the negative space
between sunbeams and déjà vu,
becoming the feeling
you get when someone says your name
and you weren’t expecting it.
Maybe the afterlife is
a library with no walls—
just thoughts alphabetised by moonlight,
where each soul is a book
opened only by those
who remember your love.
Perhaps we become metaphors,
living inside a lover’s poem,
the ghost of our smile
haunting the syntax
of someone else’s healing.
Maybe we become cities—
the blinking lights in a skyline
someone stares at when they’re lonely,
not knowing they’re looking right at you.
Or we’re the shoes left by the door,
never moved,
but never gone.
Or the song that gets stuck in your head
on a day when you need it most,
though you can’t quite remember why.
Maybe we’re the rain
that surprises the pavement in July—
unseasonal, unreasonable,
but somehow necessary.
Maybe death is the great return—
to the place we came from
before we had names,
back when we were just ideas
gathering shape
in the mind of something vast,
curious, and unspeakably kind.
Or maybe it’s weirder than that.
Maybe we become colours
no eye can perceive,
emotions not yet invented.
Maybe we become the dream
your cat has when it twitches
its paw and you swear it smiled.
Maybe we are the punchline
to a cosmic joke told backwards.
Or the password to a star,
or the echo in a black hole
repeating a secret
no one has ever said aloud.
Maybe we’re the static in the signal,
the glitch in the code
that whispers, “You’re still connected.”
But here’s what I think:
we become stories.
Not the ones etched in stone,
but the ones whispered
in kitchens and car rides,
in laughter around campfires,
in tears at 3 a.m.
when someone says,
“I miss them,”
and someone else says,
“I know.”
We live in the pause
between a question and its answer.
In the hesitation
before someone forgives themselves.
In the crack where the light gets in,
and where the light never left.
We are not the end.
We are the underline.
The bold type.
The margin note.
The reason someone rereads the page.
When we die,
perhaps we go
not away—
but into everything.
Copyright ©
Aaliyah O'Neil
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