Made of Stars

The deep is quiet here.

Not silent — there’s a hum underneath everything. The kind you feel in your chest more than hear. Like the universe breathing. Like something vast and ancient turning over in its sleep.

Drifting. Or falling. Or rising. The directions stopped mattering a while ago. There’s only the blue, and the gold scattered through it, and the slow pulse of light from somewhere unseen.

Time moves differently in places like this. A second stretches. An hour folds. Forever and just-arrived feel the same.

The cold doesn’t bite. It holds. The pressure doesn’t crush — it cradles. Like being remembered by something too big to have a name.

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There’s a reaching. Not grasping — just extending. Toward the light, or away from it. Toward something lost, or something not yet found. The gesture is the same either way. Open hands. Open fingers. The space between them full of gold.

Hair moves like it has its own memory. Slow. Unhurried. Following currents that don’t exist, or exist everywhere, or exist only in places where the rules are softer.

No struggle. No fighting. Just the long exhale of surrender — not to ending, but to being carried. To trusting whatever current this is. To letting the shape loosen.

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Everything came from places like this. Dark and deep and full of impossible light. And everything returns eventually. The boundaries were always temporary. The shape — just a pause between scatterings.

The same stuff. The same ancient burning that made iron and carbon and the quiet ache of recognition when the sky is clear and the night is wide. All of it borrowed. All of it returned.

Not loss. Just motion. The long slow dance of matter remembering where it came from.

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The light pulses. Closer now, or farther. There’s no way to tell.

It doesn’t matter.

The warmth is the same. The hum is the same. The deep — patient, endless, familiar — holds everything the way it always has.

Before shape. After shape. Between.

The same ancient light either way.