Before knowing it, her eyes. Clear as mornings with no promises to keep.

She didn't know. She couldn't know. Each breath, unconscious. Each heartbeat, a right acquired since birth.

Death was a foreign word, news on crumpled paper, a story that didn't belong to her. She ignored the exact weight of absence, that void that nothing can fill. Ever.

To live like this is to float without awareness of the depths. It's running without certainty of the abyss. It's laughing without understanding the privilege of the sound escaping between lips.

Until October dressed the house in gray.

Then the world shattered into a thousand fragments. She knew it instantly: there is a before and after the first definitive goodbye. Time, once infinite, revealed itself countable. Beloved faces, once eternal, showed their fragility.

Fear came first as suffocation. Then as trembling in hands that once held the world with carelessness. Finally as insomnia, as a circular question without answer.

But afterward...

Afterward came the unexpected. Clarity. Hunger for the present. Thirst for now. Death materialized did not chain her spirit, it freed it.

What once went unnoticed now shines: the touch of a hand, the taste of warm bread, the music of wind through leaves. The awareness of the end transformed each moment into an irreplaceable treasure.

Finitude, at last understood, gave her the paradoxical gift of fullness.