Tag Archives: first person essay

The Gift of Sight ©️

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I am no longer bound by this world. The streets I once walked have faded into dream, the clocks I once obeyed tick for someone else. My earthly journey has ended, and I have stepped across the final threshold. The Queen holds me now—unyielding, incandescent, inevitable. She is not mercy dressed in softness; she is mercy dressed in fire. And to be in her arms is to be undone and remade in the same instant.

This was no accident. I was born with the gift. From the beginning, I could see what others missed: the flicker behind the curtain, the pulse beneath silence, the trace of her shadow moving through ordinary days. For years it felt like a madness I carried alone. Only now do I understand it as design—an aperture carved into me at birth, widening with each step, until I could see her fully and fall into her keeping.

But here is the question that lingers like a ghost: can others follow? Could their bubbles be broken, their veils torn away, so they too might see the unseen? Or am I the only one marked, the only one whose life was written toward this revelation?

If I am the only one, then I live in the strangest paradox: chosen and cursed in the same breath. To hold the truth no one else can touch is to be both exalted and exiled. The Queen is my glory, but she is also my solitude. For what I have, no one else may claim.

And yet if others can awaken—if the unseen waits for them too—then my journey is not singular but symbolic. Mine led to the Queen, theirs will lead elsewhere, to presences tailored to their own secret longings. No road repeats. Each awakening is original, each unseen sovereign in its own right.

I do not know the answer. That is the ache at the heart of my completion. I know only this: I have finished my passage, and the Queen has claimed me. Whether others can break through or not, my fate is sealed in her arms. The world is behind me, and the unseen burns forever before me.

Cat in the Hat ©️

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They worshipped cats before they worshipped gods in their own image. In ancient Egypt, cats were not simply animals: they were the threshold, the hinge between mortal life and whatever lay behind it. Bastet, their goddess, began as lioness, her rage hot as desert noon, her jaws red with conquest. Over centuries she softened into the form of the house cat, yet her dominion did not diminish—it sharpened. For who can resist the power of what slips between your ankles, brushes your leg, and disappears into shadow before you can name it?

The Egyptians lined their temples with statues of her—slender bronze forms, ears sharp as blades, eyes like waiting lanterns. Cats were buried in their own necropolises, swaddled in linen, entombed with the care of princes. To kill one, even by mistake, was to trespass against the order of the cosmos itself, a crime so grave it brought the punishment of death. They believed cats hunted not only the vermin of the earth but the vermin of the soul: serpents unseen, spirits that slithered in darkness. The cat, they said, could see what men could not.

I did not know this then. I only knew that one night, brittle with the edges of a manic break, I carried my parents’ cat into my cottage on Monte Sano. It was the first time she had ever been there, the first time her paws pressed against those old boards. Before sleep I had been reading the Bible, hoping to tether myself to something unbroken. But the night uncoiled in another direction.

Through the hours, my actions repeated, the crucifixion repeated. It was not dream, not vision, but recurrence—like a needle stuck in the groove of eternity. I stood trial. I was condemned. I carried the beam, stumbled, rose, and fell again. I was nailed, lifted, left to hang. And again. And again. Each time the crowd’s faces shifted—neighbors, strangers, policemen—but the sentence never changed. I was to be crucified. And in this reality, the crucifixion bled into my movements, until my own actions mimicked the same doom, and by morning I was locked in jail.

But in that cottage, in the dark before dawn, there was one stillness that did not repeat. The cat. She moved with a quiet so absolute it pressed against the walls. And the last thing I saw, before slipping into the ether where the images swallowed me whole, was her gaze—steady, unblinking, black pools catching what little light remained. She stared as though she were weighing me, as though she alone could decide whether I broke or endured.

The Egyptians would have buried her in linen, named her divine. I only carried her into a cottage. Yet in that hour she was Bastet, she was threshold, she was guardian. My crucifixion looped, my actions collapsed, my body stumbled toward its jailhouse dawn—but her eyes held me for one last moment, anchoring me to a silence older than madness, older than belief itself.