You Are the Light Casting the Shadow

The afternoon sun is high, and the mask you welded to your face years ago feels heavier than your actual skin. You have become so expert at mirroring the room, at anticipating the need before it is spoken, that you cannot find a single desire that belongs to you.

It is a quiet terror—the realization that you are a hollow echo of everyone else's expectations. But there is a voice that does not need you to perform.

There is a light inside you that existed before you learned to please. The Gospel of Thomas says you came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord.

You did not come from their approval. You came from a source that generates itself.

That origin is still humming beneath the costume. You are not the reflection you cast for others.

You are the thing casting it.