Illusion of Solidity
—When Matter Remembered It Was Light—
I dwelt within a palimpsest of appearances,
a sepulchral architecture of borrowed forms
where every mirror preserved the vestige
of selves I had mistaken for sovereign truth.
I crowned impermanence with alabaster names,
inscribed my vanishing upon the vellum of hours,
and worshipped the transient splendour of matter
as though dust could inherit the throne of stars.
The body—my first cathedral of illusion—
opened its ossuary corridors of bone and breath;
I wandered its chambers like an heir,
unaware I had merely been entrusted with the keys.
Then you arrived—
not as an apparition summoned from Olympus,
nor as some celestial fire descending through the firmament,
but as an incorporeal hush
that entered the sealed manuscript of my being
and taught the ink its forgotten origin.
Within that silence, the hidden gardens awakened:
black irises unfurling their nocturnal scripture,
myrrh-scented winds crossing abandoned sanctuaries,
and buried rivers reclaiming the ancient music
engraved beneath their own forgetting.
I followed that music beyond desire’s dominion,
beyond the sapphire labyrinths of possession,
beyond the gilded hallucination of permanence,
until my name itself became a fading constellation
drawn briefly upon the breathing darkness.
The mountains remained in their immemorial patience.
The oceans continued their argent liturgy.
The stars kept their distance, untouched and infinite.
Only the illusion of ownership dissolved.
And then I understood—
solidity was never the substance of the world;
it was the momentary crystallisation of longing,
a fragile architecture of light and consciousness,
through which the universe concealed one final mystery:
I was not the vessel through which light entered creation;
I was the brief illusion through which light learned to believe it was separate.
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