There was a time
when I wore myself like a border,
tight against the skin,
a fragile perimeter of breath and bone.
I called it “me”
and trembled for it.

I measured the world in distances,
in threats and acquisitions,
in the narrowing calculus of survival.
Everything not-me
was shadow,
was question,
was something to hold at bay
or bend toward my hunger.

I built my small kingdom of defenses,
stone by thought,
fear by fear,
naming enemies into existence
so that I might feel real.

And death,
that great unmaking,
stood always at the edge of the map,
a silent tide
licking at the walls I raised,
whispering,
“All this will be undone.”

So I ran.
Oh, how I ran.
Into becoming, into striving,
into the endless architecture of permanence
built on dissolving sand.

But then,
not by conquest,
not by will,
something loosened.

A seam I did not know was there
split open without violence.

And what I called “I”
fell away
like a husk
that had never truly held the seed.

No thunder announced it.
No heavens parted.
Just a quiet,
immense undoing.

And suddenly,
no edge.

No center that was not everywhere.
No “other” left to stand against me.
The distance between things
collapsed into a single intimacy.

I was the gaze
and the gazed upon,
the wound
and the hand that tended it,
the cry
and the listening silence beneath it.

The world did not disappear.
It deepened.
It bloomed inward.

Every face
became my own unfolding.
Every sorrow
my own tender ache.
Every joy
a brightness I could no longer contain.

How could I harm you
when your breath
rose and fell inside my chest?

How could I take
when all things were already given
within this boundless body?

Love was no longer a virtue.
It was the only fact.

And death,
that ancient terror,
lost its teeth.

For what could it take
when there was nowhere I was not?
What could it end
when the end of a form
was only a turning of the infinite
upon itself?

The wave falls, yes,
but the ocean
does not diminish.

Now I move
not as a fragment defending its name,
but as a vastness
expressing itself in countless names.

Justice is no longer an ideal.
It is alignment
with what I am.

Mercy is no longer a choice.
It is the natural curve
of a hand
that knows it touches only itself.

And beauty,
ah, beauty,
is the recognition
of my own face
everywhere I dare to look.

I once lived
to preserve a flicker.

Now I live
as the fire itself,
uncontained,
unbroken,
without edge,
without other.

Call it One.
Call it Love.
Call it what cannot be divided.

It is what remains
when the small name
is finally laid down
and the Infinite
remembers itself.