A moment.
Consciousness.
Flesh.
Union.
Life.
Love.
Three years or three days.
A moment.
And it cannot be changed.

Breath.
Touch.
Almost ritual readings.
My observation of you.
Of every movement you make.

Smoke wrapped around this place.
Or perhaps it wasn’t smoke at all, just a dense fog.
The touches were no longer mere imprints.
They were a blessing.



The pantheons of our gods remained somewhere else.
Each of them burned, chewed through by love.
Each god reduced to a tiny grain, no longer deciding anything.

A moment that made gods of us.
Each of us separately.
And both of us together.



I lived long enough pretending the future was negotiable.
As if consequence could be delayed by style.
As if awareness could soften impact.

It didn’t.

And then, came Then.

No sound.
No rupture.
A shift so precise it felt authored.

I felt the second click into place: the hinge where everything I avoided suddenly aligned.
Every almost-choice.
Every half-confession.
Every instinct I taught myself to mistrust.

There was no panic.
Panic still believes in alternative outcomes.

There was clarity.
Brutal.
Unforgiving.
Clean.



And you know that phrase, don’t you?
The one that sits like a nauseating spasm somewhere in the throats of millions of people and gods.

The fatal moment arrived.
The turning point that changed everything.



Was that reality?
Or did my mind invent it, thrashing in agony?

I was there.
And she was there.

Her perfume and the scent of her body mixed with smoke and the smell of burning.
In that moment, all pantheons were incinerated.
We ourselves were burned.
Ready to shake the ash of the former world from our eyelids.

A labyrinth.
Mirrored corridors of universes.
Thousands of doors, all of it rushing past in darkness.

Before us, no paradisal gardens, yet the heat of hell is absent too.
Through the ruins of eras.
Beneath our feet, the crunch of someone’s destinies, empires, and worlds.
Ash grinds between the teeth.



I.
She.
We.

We hear a voice resounding across the universe:

“Mistress. Sir. Your blessed Love.”

Pointing to the very essence of being.
Pointing into the infinite void where everything is born, it proclaims:

“Welcome. All of this is yours.”