When death comes for me,
I will greet him as an old friend.
For a long time,
I never thought I’d see
thirteen,
sixteen,
eighteen,
twenty-one,
twenty-five,
thirty—
and I made peace with that.
I lived by my rules.
Walked my own path.
Did my own thing.
But a life hardened by survival
is not the same
as a life fully lived.
Planning endlessly for the future
is not living in the present.
Living inside the past
is not living your life at all.
So today—
and tomorrow—
I choose presence.
I choose to love
and to be loved
unabashedly.
I choose to welcome life
and the possibility of death
with the same open hands.
I don’t have to make life great every day.
I just have to choose
to have a great day.
If I do that,
life will take care of the rest.
And today—
today will be a great day.
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