All around me, figures stood in a circle—calm, unhurried, fully awake. They were not ghosts and not yet ancestors as I understand them. They felt like possibilities waiting to solidify into blood and story. Their eyes carried both distance and tenderness, as though they had been expecting me.

No one moved their lips, yet I heard them clearly. They spoke in a language that arrived as knowing rather than sound. I understood that this place sat outside of the timeline I cling to: no calendars, no clocks, only readiness. It was the waiting room of incarnation.

One stepped forward—not closer in distance, but sharper in presence. I could not tell if this was a grandmother from long ago or a future child yet to be born. She showed me a woven cord made of light and earth, water and breath. My name glowed along its strands, joined with names I did not recognize but somehow loved.

I realized that every life is agreed upon in a circle like this—witnessed, blessed, and remembered before it ever touches soil. We do not arrive alone. We step out of a gathered intention, a shared promise that we will carry something forward that belongs to all of us.

When the plain began to dim, I felt a gentle hand pressed between my shoulders, nudging me toward the edge of that bright nowhere. I woke with tears in my eyes, not from sadness, but from the strange comfort of knowing: before time began measuring me, love had already chosen me.