Promise That You Will Sing About Me

I think about death more than I admit.

Not in a dramatic way.

Not in the kind of way that begs for attention.

More like a quiet question that keeps tapping on the glass when everything else goes silent. Usually at night. When the lights shut off. When the world finally stops asking things of me.

That’s when the thought shows up. If I disappear tomorrow, will anyone tell my story?

Not the polished version. Not the one that makes sense after the fact. I mean the real one. The messy one. The one that smells like fear and hope in the same breath. The one that includes the parts we don’t post.

I grew up learning early that life doesn’t move gently.

It interrupts. It takes shortcuts through people. It teaches you lessons before you have the language to understand them. I’ve seen love show up in strange places.

In the way someone holds another person together when they are breaking. In the way a brother’s pain becomes your own.

In the way silence can sometimes scream louder than words.

There were nights when chaos felt routine. When distractions piled on top of each other so fast you forgot what peace even felt like. Nights where anger felt easier than grief.

Where survival became a rhythm, almost musical in its repetition. Wake up. Get through the day. Don’t think too much. Repeat.

And yet, even in that environment, something fragile kept surviving.

Hope.

It showed up in small moments. Someone believing in a dream when logic said it was foolish. Someone choosing compassion when violence would have been simpler. Someone staying when it would have been easier to run.

I’ve held people while they cried. I’ve watched strong people crumble quietly. I’ve seen how systems fail those who need them most, then blame them for the damage. I’ve seen how pain gets inherited, passed down like a family heirloom no one asked for.

Sisters trying to grow up too fast. Brothers learning hardness before tenderness. Children becoming adults without ever getting to be children.

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from living like that.

It’s not physical. It sits deeper. In your chest. In the mirror. You look at yourself and wonder when the weight got so heavy.

You wonder when thinking about the future started to feel like bargaining instead of dreaming.

Sometimes I ask myself a strange question.

Am I afraid of dying, or am I afraid of disappearing?

Because those are not the same thing. Dying feels inevitable. Disappearing feels optional.

Disappearing happens when no one remembers your voice, your intentions, your internal battles. When your life gets reduced to a sentence, or worse, a statistic. When your complexity gets flattened into something easy to digest and forget.

That’s why the idea of being sung about matters to me.

Not literally. I don’t need a song with my name in it. I need something deeper than that. I need proof that my existence left fingerprints somewhere.

That my suffering wasn’t just absorbed by the pavement and washed away. That my love for my people counted. That my mistakes weren’t the only thing that survived me.

We sing about what we remember.

We sing about what mattered enough to leave an imprint.

And I want to believe that even broken lives deserve that kind of remembrance.

Faith enters this story quietly.

Not as a loud declaration, but as a whisper when everything else feels hollow. I’ve found myself asking for forgiveness without knowing exactly what I’m apologizing for. Asking for guidance when I don’t trust my own compass.

Wondering if grace still applies when you’re tired of running but don’t know how to stop.

There’s a thirst that comes from living this way. Not for money or power or attention. A deeper thirst. For meaning. For cleansing. For something that doesn’t evaporate the moment you touch it.

You try to fill it with distractions, with ambition, with noise. But it keeps coming back.

And maybe that thirst is the point.

Maybe it’s what forces us to slow down long enough to ask who we’re becoming. What we’re contributing. What we’re leaving behind.

I don’t pretend to have answers. I’m still figuring it out in real time. Still carrying contradictions. Still learning how to choose softness without losing strength. Still hoping my best days are not all behind me.

But this much I know.

If I’m gone one day, I hope someone tells my story with care. Not to glorify it. Not to exploit it. But to honor it. To say, this person was here. This person struggled. This person loved deeply.

This person tried.

Promise that you will sing about me. Not because I was perfect. But because I was real.

Thanks for reading!