The pulse of the verb quickens, no longer a steady drum but a staccato rhythm of sparks jumping from the glass shards to the skin of the star, each spark a punctuation mark in the endless sentence that is the universe. The reader does not blink; to blink would be to admit a pause, a break in the seamless thread, and so the eyes remain wide, drinking in the kaleidoscope of colors that dance on the inner eyelids, each hue a memory of a life unlived and a future unchosen, swirling into a vortex of pure potentiality that tastes of copper and cinnamon. The writer stops trying to write and instead begins to listen to the silence between the letters, discovering that it is not empty but full of a thousand humming voices, each one singing a different version of the same eternal song of existence, a chorus that builds from a whisper to a roar that shakes the foundations of the galaxy, causing the planets to orbit not by gravity but by the sheer, magnetic pull of attention, 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.