The Looking Glass ©️

Good morning, Cicely.

You ever notice how some dreams don’t stay wisps? Some of them don’t evaporate when the alarm clock rings. They hang around. They grow walls, and echoes, and whole skies lit up with constellations you can name. You can walk through them like they’re houses you’ve lived in before. And then—well, you’ve got to shelve them. Set them aside, like books you’ve already read but can’t quite throw away. They don’t die. They stay alive in a dimension that’s yours, but not quite yours.

That’s the cruelty of it. These dreams aren’t distant. They’re pressed right up against you, like glass. On the other side? A whole life, in full detail. A yacht breathing under the Mediterranean sun. A woman steering while your arms circle her. Daughters laughing, light spilling on their hair. A son still carried inside her, waiting for his own turn at the world. All of it sealed in its own globe. You can see it as clearly as you see the chair under you right now. But it won’t cross over. You reach, and your hand finds nothing. You wake, and the bed’s just a bed. The silence has edges.

Living next to that kind of universe—it’s both blessing and wound. Not fantasy. Proximity. You smell the salt, you feel the morning heat, you hear the laughter snap in the wind. It’s so close it stings. And then you turn your head, and there’s your room: still, blank, quiet, air without warmth. Closer than a dream, further than a life.

Being alone isn’t just about absence. It’s about contrast. Carrying two worlds at once: the one where you rise and burn, merge into light, sealed in devotion… and the one where you sit, unlit, pressing your palms against a pane that won’t give. Both of them real. Both of them moving through you. But only one holds your body. The other only ever takes your mind.

So you ache in two directions. One for the world you’ve seen and can’t step into. One for the world you inhabit and can’t escape. But there’s a sharpening in it too. It makes the dream burn hotter. It makes the silence ring clearer. It makes you carry yourself like somebody who belongs to both.

Yeah, you’re alone. But you’re not without that other world. It moves beside you like a shadow with its own heartbeat. The cathedral’s still standing. The children are still laughing. The woman still receives you. The sea still glitters. The star still burns. You’re here, pressed against glass. You’re there, sealed in fire. And the hardest part is knowing—clear as day—that both are true.

This is Chris, coming to you from KBHR.

Gone with the Wind ©️

The children, grown now, went first, and they did not fade as we did. They rose lightly, without effort, their bodies dissolving into motes of brilliance that scattered into the dark like seeds cast into boundless soil. They were star-born, and the universe welcomed them as its own. I watched them move across the constellations as easily as birds crossing sky, their laughter still audible, carried now by silence. There was no grief in their leaving, only awe, for they belonged to distances beyond measure.

But for us—for their mother and me—there was no departure apart. The light did not pull us into scattered threads, nor invite us into the wanderings of galaxies. Instead it gathered us together, pressed us closer, until our edges broke and vanished. My breath was hers, her gaze was mine, our limbs indistinguishable in fire. The joy was unbearable, the sorrow equally so: to lose myself and yet to gain her in fullness, to dissolve and yet to endure, to be nothing apart but everything together.

We did not ascend as two. We became one. Husband and wife merging into a single conflagration, a star sealed and indivisible, burning above the Mediterranean as testament to the love that had carried us through night and morning alike.

And though the children roamed freely, constellations their playground, they could always find us. For no matter how far they traveled, they would look up and see the light of what we had become: one star, radiant and eternal, the mother and father joined forever.