#bro idfk

You are used to the monotony of solitude, spending your suns in silence and your nights whispering sweet nothings to the stars and spirits who would listen. Prayer was your constant companion, then. You spent years with the smell of incense clinging to your lungs as voices indistinguishable from your own echoed in the fathomless depths of your mind. Years passed, and you lost the line that divided you from Them. 

You’ve heard others speak of apotheosis as though it is some grand and horrible ritual. You, however, know better. This practice of resurrection — of pulling your frayed edges apart only to weave them anew, erasing the scars and imperfections that made you so beautiful a tapestry — is nothing of the sort.

It begins with a quiet death.

You are a young man when you no longer recognize your own reflection. The eyes that stare back at you when you look into the sacred pools you were bound to are not your own, but they are also no one else’s. A kaleidoscopic shift of color and light belong to an amorphous face, the features too blurry for your mortal mind to parse. Even now, you catch yourself holding your breath when you pass by a mirror.

It’s the night of your bonding when you realize that your voice is no longer your own. The whispers at the back of your mind have bled into the forefront, and when your mother comes to ask if you’re ready for the ceremony, it takes you too long to recognize your own name.

You become people other than yourself. You begin to slip and crumble and break apart, and when only a scarcity of your soul remains, you must choose whether or not you wish to go quietly. It is your destiny to fall.

Unfortunate, then, how easily the red string of fate is cut.

You are older now, living in a small apartment a world away from the specters that once haunted you. You are a father; a doctor; a friend. You are many things, but the heart in your chest is your own, and when you speak, it is with certainty. Admittedly, you pray from time to time, sometimes for the soul of the weathered ronin whose body would receive no burial and sometimes for those who may soon join him. Old habits die hard. 

You’ve learned to afford yourself that much.