Inheritance

 a poem by Roger B. Rueda

Tonight, in the window’s dark reflection,
I saw my father. Not just the shape
of his face, the familiar set of his jaw,
but something deeper, something harder
to name. A stillness. A vacancy.
A quiet resignation I had never noticed
in my own features until now.

I remember him sitting alone,
the half-light gathering in his lap,
his gaze somewhere far beyond the walls
that contained us. A man who lived
as if he were already gone,
who measured his days not in joys
or failures but in the slow subtraction
of what mattered.

He had stopped expecting anything
from the world. Stopped believing in love,
in laughter, in the need for another’s voice
to break the silence. And so,
when the time came,
when his body finally caught up
with his absence, death took nothing
he had not already given away.

My mother called his name,
her voice cracking against the still air,
but he did not turn back.
He had long since stepped beyond reach.

Now, I look at myself in the glass
and wonder: is this how it begins?

I tell myself I am different,
that I still have time, that I have not yet
surrendered to the quiet pull of disappearance.
But I recognize the weight in my bones,
the slow erosion of urgency,
the way I have learned to watch life
from the edges instead of living inside it.

Perhaps despair is an inheritance,
passed down like an old coat,
its fabric worn and familiar,
its weight too comfortable to discard.
Perhaps loneliness is not just a feeling
but a cycle, a reflection repeating endlessly
in glass and blood.

I reach out, my fingertips meeting
cold glass, but my father’s face
does not move. Only my own.
Only the certainty that someday,
someone will stand where I am now,
staring at their own reflection,
seeing not just themselves,
but the ghost of the person
they are becoming.