It’s Golden Light

By Peter Bowden

He had always feared the end would be dark, full of silence and forgetting. But when it came, it was neither. It was a door, slightly ajar, with golden light spilling from the other side. No thunder, no final breath caught in the throat. Just the sense of being gently untethered—like a boat slipping from its moorings at dawn.

He walked into a place that didn’t ask for names or reasons. The air carried the scent of lilacs and old paper. He heard music—not from instruments, but from the voices of those he had loved. A woman’s soft laugh. The jingle of a dog’s collar. The creak of the porch swing from a house that had long since faded from the map. All of it, still here. Still his.

And in the world he left behind, a man woke early to tend the garden. A child reread a bedtime story she didn’t know he had once read aloud. A friend paused mid-sentence, not knowing why he smiled. That’s how the echo moves: quiet, but steady. It lingers in coffee cups, in birdsong, in the hands we hold and the ones we remember. It says, he was here, and in some gentle way, still is.

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