The mind left first.

It slipped away quietly, without ceremony, like a thought interrupted mid-sentence. One moment it was there—naming things, remembering faces, pretending pain had meaning—and the next, it loosened its grip. Memories unraveled. Logic softened. The body kept breathing out of habit, confused by the silence behind the eyes.

Doctors called it dissociation. I called it relief.

Without the mind, time lost its shape. Days passed without being counted. The body moved on instinct alone, a shell performing rehearsed motions: eating, walking, smiling when expected. Touch meant nothing. Words arrived late, like echoes in an empty hall. I watched myself from somewhere distant, unable to care enough to return.

Then the body began to leave.

It resisted at first---bones aching, organs tiring, skin bruising too easily. Sleep grew heavier. Waking felt optional. The mirror showed a figure fading, hollowed by absence. The body had been loyal, carrying grief it never chose, holding together long after it was forgiven for wanting to stop.

When it finally let go, there was no pain. Only stillness.

That was when the soul remained.

Alone.

No thoughts to explain it. No flesh to anchor it. Just awareness suspended in a vast, unbearable quiet. The soul understood then what the mind had tried to protect it from and what the body had suffered to delay: that existence itself could be a wound.

The soul did not scream. There was no voice left.

It simply lingered, heavy with everything that was never healed, drifting through the space where a life had once been—learning, too late, that leaving does not always mean escape.

Sometimes, it only means you have no place left to rest.