The body forgets itself slowly, like paper yellowing in drawers no one opens anymore. The paint peels, the teeth darken, the laughter thins. We keep old photos not to remember, but to lie. This was us, we say — as if the present isn’t erasing the frame. The city crumbles in patches, hidden behind scaffolding and slogans, but the rust works quietly in silence and in water pipes and ankle bones. Mold curls around the corners of ceilings like forgotten prayers. A once-sacred song echoes down alleys warped by time and engine heat. Love decays too: not in heartbreak, but in the hollowing, the shrug, the routine nod over burnt toast, the way hands pass each other in hallways like strangers. Meaning fades. Promises crack. The tongue falters in its urgency. Even God is now a rumor — a scent in a burnt-out church. Incense clinging to stone. The earth doesn’t care. It swallows and cycles, turns bone to dust to flower to ash again. Every monument is a delay. Every echo is a ghost in rehearsal. We archive rot: museums of extinction, playlists of vanished voices, pixels of dead eyes preserved in eternal smiles. The skin loosens. The mind fogs. Everything warm goes cold. But there is grace in the falling apart. There is beauty in the bruises, in the slumps, in the soft collapse of what once stood proud. A rotting fruit still feeds the soil. A toppled house makes space for wildflowers. We do not admit it, but we envy what yields. What lets go. What breaks first. We worship permanence and secretly wish for freedom. The truth is we are all leaving, piece by piece, cell by cell. And maybe the greatest mercy is that we don’t notice the moment it starts — the first flake, the first chip, the first breath not quite as deep. The end is not a moment but a mood, not a line but a slow unraveling. We dance on borrowed legs, smile with borrowed teeth, dream with borrowed time, and everything we love is fading.