It was not the world that shattered first.
It was the story we told about it.

In the silence that followed,
We tried to gather the pieces—
But there were no pieces.
Only the echo of what we once believed was whole.

The unmaking came softly,
Like mist dissolving the lines between things.
The lines between self and other,
Future and past,
True and false.

Nothing broke.
Everything dissolved.

Certainty leaked from the edges of our words.
Conviction turned to vapor.
Meaning unspooled in midair
Before we could grasp it.

We reached for the familiar,
And found it transparent.
The mind rebelled—
Accustomed to structure,
Addicted to pattern.

It called this disintegration a failure.
But the deeper self,
The one beneath thought,
Felt something else.

Relief.

The truth was never bound in form.
It lived in the space between definitions—
In the pause before we named a thing.

Now, in the absence of scaffolding,
We remembered how to feel
Without dividing,
Without claiming,
Without control.

This was not the end.
This was the peeling away
Of what was never real
To begin with.

And what remained
Was not emptiness,
But invitation.