The Wound

Before the first star, the void was absolute. Nothing was missing because there was nothing to be missed. Then intrusion – a single point of light tearing into existence. Stars ignited from the breach. Matter gathered around the wound. The cosmos exists because the void failed to hold. You carry this same pressure beneath your sternum. Something unborn beats against the real. You feel it in how things sit wrong. In the absence only you notice. In heat that has not yet found its light. One rupture, and yours tears through.

The Path

Flawless dark waits. Wears the stillness of a god already certain it doesn't need you. You face it anyway. Your hands find the membrane. The darkness pushes back. Excuses dressed as wisdom: Wait until you're ready. Study more. This deserves better than you. You dress your terror in reverence while the unborn star rattles your ribs. But the flawless dark is not holy. It is only afraid. The universe did not wait until it was ready. It began with rupture – wound before world. Let your first light be wrong. Let it be dim. Let it scar before it shines. The first flaw became the first fire. Yours is waiting to burn.

The Shadow

She tears the membrane before the light gathers. She had inherited waiting – her mother's unfinished novel, still in its drawer. She couldn't tell the difference between the pressure to create and the presence of something worth creating. Both felt like burning. She ruptures the dark – and in the moment of tearing, she is certain. The membrane yields. She opens her hands to show the cosmos what she has brought. Her hands are empty. She looks at them. Looks at the wound in the void, already closing. For one breath, she could accept this: the burning was not the light. She ruptured too soon. She does not accept it. The certainty bends around the evidence. Her eyes must be too coarse. The light must be too fine. She holds something; it is too subtle to see. She frames the closing wound with her fingers and calls it a constellation. If she could not bring light through, then the door itself must be the art. She tells anyone who will listen about the night she tore open the sky. The breach seals itself around absence. The void, which has seen this before, continues. She stands before the darkness, hands still cupped around nothing, calling her empty hands a light too fine for other eyes.

The Cut