Article
The Silent Curtain Call
By: Dr. Hani Zarbaft Ali
Life is a phantom gallery of “one last times,” a series of quiet departures we rarely recognize until the air grows cold where a presence used to be. We move through our favorite cities, sit upon the weathered wood of a familiar bench, or press our foreheads against a “wish come true,” unaware that the clock is striking its final, muffled note.
These moments arrive with the suddenness of a winter dusk. They do not announce themselves with trumpets; they slip through the door on a random evening, soft and unbidden, even as we are busy praying for forever.
There is a cruel elegance to how time operates. It is relentless, carving the trajectory of our lives with a heavy, unyielding hand. Yet, it is fragile, evaporating so feebly that we barely feel it leave.
To cherish the “last time” is to live in a state of sacred awe. It is the courage to treat every mundane breath as a future ghost—to look at the precious and the beautiful today, knowing that tomorrow, time will have turned it into nothing but a shimmering, unreachable memory. We wake up to find that time has perished the tangibility of our joys, leaving us only with the starlight of what once was. Its the “hidden finale”, the way life quietly closes doors that we once walked through while we’re still standing in the hallway, unaware of how tomorrow’s train is seeking us.
There is a profound, albeit heavy wisdom in realizing that we are constantly living through “lasts” that
come without warning bells.
So we live in the ache of the now.
And love as if we’re already a memory,
cherishing the tick of the clock
not as a measure of duration,
but as a heartbeat
one that is precious simply because it is
the only one we are promised,
before the winter evening claims the rest,
while we’ll spend years trying to find again.
