The last letter of a man who stayed.
I do not have long. My hand will not hold the pen the way it once did, and my breath is coming shorter now, but I have to set this down before I go, for whoever finds it, in a drawer or a box or the pocket of a coat that no one wanted. No one ever warned me. Someone should have. Let me be the one who warns you.
I was the man who stayed.
My whole life, every time a wider road opened in front of me, and one opened many times, far more times than I ever let myself count, I found a reason to stay exactly where I was. I was good at finding those reasons. I called them caution. I called them responsibility. I called them loyalty, and patience, and waiting for the right season. I told myself the walls around me were real and solid, that a man in my position had no choice, that next year would be the year, that once things settled I would finally move. A whole life went by in next years. And I never moved. Not once. I stood in the same small room from the beginning of my life to this bed I am dying in, damn… imagine the things I called wisdom.
I remember the mornings I woke with the whole thing decided, this is the year I finally go, and by nightfall I had talked myself back down into the same chair. I remember the once or twice I packed a bag in my mind and never in my hands. I was always going. I never went.
I always believed that when the end came, and I was asked to give some account of the life I had been given, I would have my reasons ready. I had polished them for decades. I truly thought they were solid enough to stand on. The end is here now, it is tonight, I can feel it in the room with me, and I have reached for those reasons one last time, and every single one of them has turned to dust in my mouth. They were only ever curtains I called walls, because I was too afraid to reach out and touch them and feel how thin they were. One honest push, in any year of my life, and they would have parted, and the whole wide world would have been standing right there on the other side. I never pushed. I spent a lifetime guarding a door that had no lock.
I was a potter. I spent fifty years with my hands in the clay, shaping it, bending it to my will, and I never once noticed that a small room had been shaping me the entire time, hardening me into its own narrow form the way wet clay hardens inside a mould, until there came a day I could not have walked out even if someone had torn the door clean off its hinges. The cage stopped being the room. The cage became me.
Hear what it cost, because you are the one I am trying to spare. I did not suffer. That is the whole horror of it. I was safe. I was comfortable. And the comfort was the very thing that killed the larger man I was meant to become. I can feel him now, that man, the one I could have been, standing at the foot of this bed with all the roads I refused to walk, and he is heavier to look at than anything I ever carried in my two arms. A whole life of unlived life. It has a weight you cannot imagine until you are lying where I am lying now.
Here is what I need you to hear, whoever you are. When life opens a wider road to you, and it will, do not reach for the reason to stay. You will always find one. The reasons are endless, and every last one of them is a lie wearing the face of wisdom. The door in front of you has no lock. I know this now with a certainty I would trade my soul to have held sooner. I stood at mine for a lifetime and never once tried the handle, because I was so sure it was locked that I never troubled to check.
Be honest with yourself in the one place where it matters. If you are truly held, truly chained, without the power or the means to go, that is a different thing, and there is mercy for the one who genuinely could not move. But do not do what I did and name yourself chained when you were only comfortable. I wore that lie for a lifetime, and I only saw through it tonight, when seeing through it can do nothing more for me, and everything for you.
The earth is wide. It was always so much wider than I let myself believe. Do not spend your one life in a single corner of it and call that corner the whole world. Get up. Go. Do not wait for the right time, there is no right time, there was never going to be a right time, that was the last and the best of all the lies. My time is finished now. Yours is not yet. Get up while the getting up is still yours to do, and walk out, walk out into the wide