# Script Faded: Two There is a strange melancholy in the act of writing itself—not in what is written, but in the writing. Each letter, as it takes shape, seems to acknowledge its own mortality. The pen moves across the page like a creature aware that its traces will fade, that time itself is a kind of erasure. I have often thought about this: how the written word pretends to permanence while being surrounded by contingency. A stone lasts longer than ink. A breath lasts longer than certain ideas. Yet we write as though words might outlive us, might speak to someone we will never know, in an age we cannot imagine. The title came to me this way—*Script Faded*—not because I wish to describe the literal dimming of letters on old paper, though that too happens. Rather, I mean something about the fundamental condition of writing: that it is always already a ghost of intention. The writer dies, the reader rewrites in their own mind what was never fully said, and between the two, the text floats like ash suspended in still air. When I was young, I believed in the power of words. I thought that if one could arrange them perfectly—with sufficient precision, sufficient beauty—they might pierce the veil between one consciousness and another. I still believe this, perhaps, but with a difference: I now know the veil is not merely between minds but within each mind, a constant shifting of light and shadow. Writing, then, is not an act of communication. It is an act of witness. The writer witnesses their own thought taking form, becoming strange and foreign, acquiring a life that was never intended. And the reader, if they are honest, witnesses not the writer's thought but their own encounter with black marks on white space—an encounter that resembles communion but is not quite communion. There is a relief in this diminishment. If words cannot truly bridge the gap, then they need not carry the burden of doing so. They can simply be what they are: signs of an intention that was never pure, expressions of a self that was never stable, monuments to a moment that is already lost. The script fades. Not into illegibility, perhaps, but into the kind of clarity that comes only when we stop insisting that words mean something fixed, something final. They mean, instead, what they mean to each reader in their solitude—which is to say, they mean something always vanishing, always being reborn, always incomplete.

16.
Not just today, but all my life through,
I have loved you, yet the words never came true!
Never once did I speak how much you meant,
Now too late—you are gone, time misspent!

17.
Those who love waste away, they die by degrees,
The world's enchantment, hope's bonds—all these
Snap one by one. Life is mere dust on cloth,
Shed in an instant. Not that we die—rather
We disappear, hidden in life's crowd.
When the note of farewell has sounded loud,
All storms will cease, and the boat will find
The shore of peace, and life sees the infinite mind.

18.
Pure and spotless the soul that soars aloft,
Like wings unfolded, eternal and soft,
Dwelling forever in the heart of God.
Who seeks eternal peace treads only that road—
The soul drunk on love of the Divine
Finds peace alone, in that shrine.
Peace comes, and only peace, to fill the soul's expanse,
When in God's love we enter the trance.

19.
He departed before his time came round—so it was written in fate.
The body still hale, the spirit still bright, yet he met with death at the gate.
How the heart of a man turns to wood, I know not, in some hidden crack—
No blossoms there, only the rustling answer to the falling leaves' call back.

20.
The marks that tears leave run deep, so deep—they do not fade.
When the heart's beloved departs, prayer alone has power to persuade.
Here lie all the dear ones I have known, resting in their ease—
Friend, beloved, father, grandfather...and soon this body, these.
All sleep here in peace, the dearest of mine,
And I too shall come, in time, to that line.

21.
Take with you the tears from these eyes—I have nothing else.
Memory remains, and love survives—these are all my wealth.
The funeral rites, the dust and ash, a few lines of mourning verse—
Poor as I am, what more can I give? This is all I can disburse.

22.
When I walk by the graveside and think in the depths of my heart:
From dust I came, to dust I returned, and to dust I shall depart.

23.
Whatever dread visions you conceive,
Hold them dear within your heart;
Paradise shall be denied, I believe,
If you keep not prayer as your part.

24.
Tonight the lamp in this house has dimmed,
The beloved voice—so tender, so dear—has fallen silent forever.
The place in my heart's temple that was filled
No one shall ever fill, no, never.

25.
Why such tears at death? Is all truly ended and gone?
What weight of sorrow makes the heart so burdened on?
Those who die live on, hidden in this world still,
What they left behind remains, weighs upon the will.
In the desert, vast and empty as it seems,
How many lie in graves, in death's extremes!
This is God's own sorrow, this law we all obey—
All move toward that shore, all pass that way.
What comes or goes from graves, what does it matter, after all?
Yet shadows of grief gather round the pall.
This world is veiled in illusion's spell,
Only the other shore holds what is real.

26.

Alas, he who in life could never fulfill his longing—
why does obstruction come to bar his way in death?

27.

Weep as you will, let rivers of tears flow—
he will not return. What has gone, has gone;
only solace circles round the heart.
Some depart early, others later—all must go their way.
But those whose faith in God runs fathomless
live on through death with the power of life itself.

28.

In this heart lies the deep, waking mark of memory—
though you are gone, these eyes will see you still.

29.

That night I woke in sudden terror
to find the messenger of death standing at my door,
his face bearing a cruel, unknowable smile.
What troubled thought seized me, I cannot say,
but tears came in a flood, and I cried out:
How can I bear it? I love you so!

30.

Those who cannot help but love
carry hearts more precious than gold;
drawing them close, holding them in their own breast,
they endure beyond death—imperishably renowned.