No Man Is an Island

The bell is ringing somewhere. Not for you— not yet— but don't ask who it's for. It's for the stranger who died this morning in a hospital you've never visited in a town you'll never see. And you think: that's not my grief. But it is. Every death diminishes you— not like a wound but like erosion, like a continent losing coastline so slowly no one notices until the maps need redrawing. You are not an island. You are a peninsula at best— connected to every other body by ground you can't see but walk on every day. The woman who made your coffee this morning— her mother is dying. You didn't ask. She didn't say. But the coffee tasted like care because even grief teaches people to pay attention to small things. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for the part of you that is them— the shared blood of being the same species, the same accident of carbon on the same small rock. When the bell tolls for me— and it will— I want someone, somewhere, to hear it and pause. Not mourn. Not weep. Just pause. That pause is the proof that I existed not just for myself but as part of the mainland— connected, diminished by loss, enlarged by every life that brushed against mine and left its coastline slightly changed.