The light did not shine on things; it rose from them— like a secret returning to the surface after centuries of silence. It threaded through the air in slow spirals, touching water, stone, and skin with the same quiet tenderness. I could feel it naming what had no words, gathering what had been scattered by time.

Shapes began to form—not as faces fully seen, but as echoes of memory navigating their way back into being. Some moved like voices finding their language again. Others glimmered like stories that had waited lifetimes to be spoken aloud. In their glow, I felt a truth settling into me gently: beginnings live inside endings; first breath sleeps curled within the last.

The veil between worlds thinned until it felt like a membrane of dawn. On one side stood everything I have known; on the other, everything that has always known me. The light offered no commands, no warnings. It simply received—every fear, every name, every forgotten fragment— and returned them as wholeness, soft as warm breath in winter air.

Then the glow deepened. It felt as though something unborn— a memory that had not yet taken form—was trying to speak. Not with sound, but with a trembling radiance that pulsed through my palms and chest. I stood still, letting it bloom. It was the memory before memory, the lamp hidden inside darkness, learning how to shine.

When the light finally loosened, it left a faint warmth inside my hands, as if I had been carrying a lantern I could not see. I realized the lantern had never been separate from me. The unborn light was not waiting to appear—it was waiting for me to slow down enough to notice it breathing.