Title: What Time Leaves Behind Poem by ashok jadhav

(The speaker sits or stands quietly, as if surrounded by invisible remnants of the past. Their voice is gentle, deliberate, weighted with memory.)
Monologue:
Time does not rush.
It erodes.
Quietly, patiently, until even certainty becomes dust.
I used to believe memories were anchors—
proof that what mattered would remain.
But memory fades, reshapes itself,
until I'm no longer sure what truly happened
and what I've rewritten just to survive.
I look at my hands and see every year I've lived.
Not in wrinkles alone,
but in what they can no longer hold.
Faces blur. Voices soften.
Even grief grows tired.
And that frightens me more than death ever could.
(Pauses, eyes distant.)
What are we, if not temporary witnesses
to our own disappearing lives?
We spend so much time preserving moments—
photographs, names, anniversaries—
as if remembrance could outrun decay.
But time takes everything eventually,
even the things we swear are permanent.
And yet… there is mercy in forgetting.
If memory never loosened its grip,
we would drown in what we have lost.
Perhaps time is not only a thief,
but a quiet teacher,
showing us when to hold on
and when to let go.
(Softly.)
I will not outrun time.
I will not defeat death.
But while I am still here—
while memory still answers when I call—
I will speak the names,
feel the moments,
and accept that to live at all
is to agree to vanish.
(The speaker exhales, calm and resolute, as if making peace with impermanence.)