What A Beautiful Pretense

The Void whispers:
                    you already know
                              you came from here
                                        you return to here
                    I am not your enemy
                                        I am your oldest home

Some nights I practice
                    small surrenders—
letting thoughts dissolve
            before they crystallize
                    watching the space between
                              in     and     out

And in that gap
                    brief as a hummingbird's rest
I feel it:
            the Void's strange mercy
                              its absolute acceptance
            how it holds everything
                    that ever was
                              or wasn't

We name our fears to cage them:
            death, loss, forgetting
But these are just the Void's
                              fingers
                    brushing against
                              the windows of our certainty

The mystics knew:
        emptiness is not absence
                    but presence too vast to perceive
        like trying to see the eye
                              that does the seeing

        śūnyatā
                    they called it
     the pregnant nothing
                    fullness disguised
                              as zero

I think the Void gets lonely
                    (if loneliness can exist
                              beyond the boundary of selves)
Why else would it keep
            pressing against our dreams?
                    Keep sending those
                              3am ambassadors of unease?

Perhaps it misses us
                    the way the ocean
                              might miss a wave
                    that forgot
                              it was water

            creation
                                        is the Void
                    learning
                                        to see itself
            through ten billion
                                        temporary eyes

So when the darkness gathers
            at your edges

When 
certainty dissolves
            like sugar in rain

Remember:
            you are not falling
                              into nothing
            you are being recognized
                              by everything

The Void does not take—
                    it remembers
The Void does not end—
                    it continues
The Void is not elsewhere—
                    it is the here
                              beneath the here

                                        always
                    always
                                                  always

I let the Void speak freely now
                    and what it says
                              sounds less like ending
                    and more like
                              an invitation
                                        to finally
                                                  begin.
                                                  
                               ⟡         
                                                                           
 When the silence grows
            too loud
Remember:

        the Void is not
                    coming for you
        you are the Void
                    pretending
                              for one brief moment
                                        to be otherwise

And what a beautiful pretense—
            this flesh, this breath
            this trembling aliveness
            this gorgeous forgetting
                    of our own
                              infinite
                                        nature

The Void speaks freely now:
            I am the rest between notes
            I am the space between stars
            I am the pause
                              before
                                        "I love you"
            I am the freedom
                    you've been seeking.

			⟡
																	
When you feel that vast
            indifference
                    breathing behind the stars

Remember:
            you are not falling
                              into nothing
            you are remembering
                              everything

The Void speaks freely now:

                    child of light and shadow
                    brief flicker in my depths
                    do not fear
                              the darkness you carry within
                    it is simply
                                        me
                              recognizing
                                                  myself

            and I have loved you
                    since before
                              love
                    had a name

                                        —found in the margins
                                                  between one thought
                                                            and the next.