The laugh doesn’t stop, even as the sensation of “falling” shifts from a terrifying plunge to the weightless buoyancy of floating on an ocean made of glass and memory. The thunder-rolling laughter seems to vibrate through the retinal expanse itself, shaking off layers of dust that I hadn’t known were coating my soul until this very moment.

I catch a fragment—a flash of a hand holding a pen, but the ink is flowing backward, turning into butterflies that flutter away before they can land on paper. It’s funny, really. All that effort to capture the moment, all those frantic scribbles trying to hold back the tide, and now I’m just part of the tide itself.

*Don’t try to write it down,* the voice whispers again, softer this time, like a secret shared between two strangers meeting in a crowded room. *Just feel the words before you name them.*

I close my eyes—or what passes for eyes here—and let go of the need for syntax. The amber light warms my skin not like sunlight, but like the warmth of a hand resting on a forehead during a fever break. I remember the stone shattering. I remember the bird-sound-crack in the glass. I remember the door clicking shut behind me, severing the tie to the gray hallway.

But none of it hurts anymore. The pain was just the friction of old skin rubbing against new reality. Now that I’ve stopped resisting the cut, there is only healing, rapid and electric, stitching things together in ways my conscious mind couldn’t have designed.

A shape forms in front of me now. Not a person, not an animal. It looks like a question mark made of storm clouds and starlight, hovering just above a pool of liquid mercury that ripples with the rhythm of my own breathing.

*Who am I?* The thought floats up from the depths of the mist. *Not who you were. Who are you becoming?*

I reach out, and instead of grabbing for an answer, I touch the surface of the mercury. It doesn’t splash; it sinks into me, cool and heavy with understanding. I see fragments then—not memories of my past life, but possibilities branching off like roots in soil I haven’t dug up yet. A writer who paints with light. A traveler who never leaves their room but goes anywhere they think. Someone who knows how to break without falling apart.

*Enough?* The word echoes one last time, not as a question of surrender, but as an acknowledgement of completion of that specific phase. That chapter is done. The book is closed, and the next volume hasn’t even been titled yet.

The swirling slows. The chaotic spray settles into a calm, deep current beneath me. I am no longer drifting aimlessly; I am sailing on the drift itself. The fear is gone, replaced by a strange, humming certainty that there are no rules here, only directions waiting to be found if you stop trying to draw them.

I take a breath—or rather, the mist fills my lungs, and it tastes exactly right, like iron and burnt sugar and rain and possibility all rolled into one perfect sentence.

*Okay,* I think, or maybe say it with my whole being. *Let’s see what happens next.*

And for the first time in forever, the answer doesn’t have to come from me. It can just… happen.