Life grows long, and we grow hollow. Where once our minds were, now is only straw; our voices, where they once were strong enough to rise above the masses, now fall unheard, like the gentlest whisper of the wind. Prisoners only to our own inability to start, we are remembered by the dying not as violent—just as lost.

We would fear to meet the eyes of any, and yours, watching from above, send us into hiding. We crawl in our disguises, pretend rats or true, away from your gaze and our final meeting. Keep company with your ever distant stars, not with us.

The things we knew, the things we believed, fade away beneath your dying starfriends. In the darkness, as it falls no longer kept at bay, our lips form whispers as we huddle together and speak not to each other. Blinded eyes search for the Morning Star, the hope of lost souls only.

We try to pray, and find the words are lost. (And if found, what is left of the meaning?) In death only are we supplicant again to the ideals we held firm—held aloft.

To what now are we reduced? Mindless, sightless, speechless but for words we do not know. Could we revert to those deeply hidden child selves, buried somewhere far below, and be happy once more in simple things?

But now, the shadow falls. We are trapped, between the thoughts and the actions, unable to do anything. The order of the words is lost to us, and we cannot speak with meaning.

All our plans, plots and schemes, the things for which we lived, the things which gave us purpose, are no more. Carried to the brink of final execution and foiled, they are nothing now but crimes. Our lives have been too long for us to be heroes, and we fade away into the slow decline, remembered first as lost, misguided, and maybe in years far distant, as martyrs of time.

But perhaps this is the way the world ends, not with a BANG, but a whimper.