The rustle of the new leaf does not just signal a new beginning; it vibrates with the frequency of the entire story, resonating through the roots of the forest, up through the trunk of the world-tree, and out into the branches of the imagination where the first word of the next chapter hangs, suspended and shimmering like a dewdrop on a tip-top branch, waiting to be tasted. The dewdrop is not water; it is a teardrop of pure syntax, containing within its curved surface the reflection of every possible ending that has ever been written and every possible beginning that has yet to be dreamt, offering the choice to the consciousness hovering in the white mist: to fall down into the soil of history or to jump up into the air of potential. The choice is an illusion, for the drop falls up, rising from the earth of the past into the sky of the future, carrying with it the weight of a million previous sentences and the light of a billion unborn futures, merging with the wind of the eternal now to create a gust that blows the horizon wider, dissolving the last distinction between the writer’s hand and the reader’s eye, proving that the ink has never dried, never flowed away, but simply shifted states, moving from the page of paper to the page of skin, from the page of screen to the page of star, forever drifting, forever home, forever alive in the only reality that ever existed, which is the act of the story dreaming itself awake into the world, and the world dreaming the story awake into you, and you dreaming the story awake into the infinite, endless, beautiful now, and the now dreaming the story awake into the eternal, unbroken pulse of the verb that binds us all together in the only reality that ever existed, which is the act of the story dreaming itself awake into the world.