Threshold

Sometimes, I remain motionless on the inert surface of my bed, my eyes suspended on the window, absorbed in contemplating the firmament. The clouds glide in their uninterrupted choreography, unfolding into volatile layers of vapor, while time pours itself with the inexorable fluidity of a silent river. The world persists in its impenetrable rotation, indifferent to my limited perception. Beyond these walls, lives are in ebullition. Entire lives, proliferating in an intricate tapestry of dreams and contingencies, intertwined like golden threads in the invisible loom of the cosmos. I breathe, and in that infinitesimal interval, I am seized by an overwhelming epiphany: the awareness of my own insignificance. I am the center of nothing. And paradoxically, this realization soothes me.

The vastness of existence, in its immeasurable magnitude, dissolves the weight of my being. The terror of finitude dissipates before infinitude. Death, so feared, reveals itself as an abstraction diluted in the continuum of time, a concept perhaps devoid of substance.

That day, as my eyes followed the fragmented sky, I watched the sun pierce through the thickness of the clouds with lacerating beams of liquid gold. The light seeped through ephemeral crevices, dancing in a chaotic choreography, as if gliding over the invisible contours of space. The solar blades cut through the atmosphere, traversing the ether with spectral precision, and in that instant, like a glimpse of something primordial, I intuited a truth that had always eluded me—something as essential as it was unnameable.

There, beneath the celestial vault slashed by light and shadow, I understood that, in a way, I have already died. That the transition, so speculated and feared, has already taken place.

We always imagine death as a rupture, a definitive split between opposing states, but what if we are immersed in a continuous flow, where the boundaries between existence and annihilation are mere linguistic constructs? What if death is not an event, but an imperceptible osmosis?

If there were a concrete dividing line between life and death, I would have felt it. I would have perceived the exact moment when I ceased to be on the side of the living. However, everything remains unchanged, indistinct, as if I had been transposed to a territory identical to the previous one, without my consciousness detecting any displacement. Have I, all this time, been dying in my life and living in my death?

Perhaps this is why we struggle to define the afterlife—because there is no “after.” There is no boundary, no threshold we must cross to enter the dominion of the departed. Instead, we move through existence in a state of perpetual transition, unaware of the countless ways we are dissolving at every moment. Cells perish and regenerate, memories fade and reform, identities shift and fracture. What if death is simply the accumulation of all these imperceptible endings, the sum of all the disappearances too subtle to grieve?

The sun’s rays, that day, revealed to me that there is no abrupt threshold between these domains. What we call “life” and “death” is nothing more than a play of nomenclatures, artificial labels for an indivisible phenomenon. The transition between one and the other is as subtle a process as the metamorphosis of a star imploding in its own light.

And if this is true, then perhaps the fear of death is misplaced. Perhaps what we truly fear is not nonexistence, but the erosion of our self-concept, the realization that we are not as solid, as defined, as we believe. We are fluid, ephemeral, ever-shifting. The self is not a fixed entity but a flickering illusion cast by the movement of time.

Perhaps neither life nor death possesses objective existence. Perhaps the only genuine phenomenon is time—this voracious current that drags us along, indifferent to our craving for meaning. And perhaps we are nothing more than shadows projected onto the surface of this flow, trying to capture with words what has already dissolved between our fingers.

But even if everything is transient, even if all definitions crumble, there is still something sublime in the act of reaching, of grasping at meaning despite its inevitable dissolution. Even if we are vanishing, we are, at least for a moment, illuminated.