#RIP

Day 7/30

It is raining, softly, like the sky is being careful not to interrupt. The funeral is happening somewhere behind your screen. You scroll a little slower, maybe you think you’re paying attention, but you aren’t. The priest’s voice blends into the low hum of a hundred silent notifications.

The casket is open. Inside, the dead person’s mouth trembles. They are trying to speak. Their lips move with the weight of a secret they should have said before the end.

“Can you hear me?” they ask.

No one looks up. Someone is typing rest in peace into a caption box. Someone else is recording the drizzle because it looks poetic through a filter. Even you keep reading, eyes moving but not seeing.

The dead person speaks again, a little louder. “I’m still here.”

You scroll. The priest scrolls between his notes. A child plays a game on her mother’s phone. The coffin becomes another backdrop for sympathy emojis.

The dead person coughs, startled by their own breath. “You don’t even notice,” they say. Their voice breaks, but not the connection, because there isn’t one. “You don’t hear me. None of you do.”

You blink at the words on your screen, maybe thinking they mean something else. The text keeps going, but the voice underneath it grows faint. The rain stops. The crowd disperses, eyes still lowered, blue light flickering across their faces.

The casket closes itself.

You’ve reach the end of the paragraph. You kept

scrolling.