When the light thins, what remains is what was always there.
Author’s note:
This piece is a conversation with the imaginative “I”—the interior witness and conscience that accompanies us quietly through a lifetime.
We have reached dusk, and it is getting darker with each blink. The light does not disappear all at once; it thins gradually, as though inviting reflection before surrender. Perhaps it is time, then, to gently untangle the skein of your existence in our shared life.
Others know me by name. They greet what stands before them—measured, composed, understandable. They build their impressions, their relationships, their narratives around that visible figure. But you have always lived behind the curtain, unannounced, unintroduced, and yet more constant than any companion I have known.
I often wondered how others would perceive you, if they could. Would they recognize your cadence beneath my speech? Would they hear the hesitation when I strayed from what you quietly insisted upon? Or would they only see the acceptable shape I offered them—the softened version, the one easier to hold?
Language falters where you begin. It is difficult to articulate a presence that is neither separate nor identical, neither entirely conscience nor merely thought. You are witness and measure both. You do not interrupt; you observe. You do not accuse; you endure.
We have lived together for as long as memory reaches—perhaps since my first spoken words, perhaps even before language knew how to divide what was felt from what was shown. Yet there were seasons when I thought you had left me.
The fear that you would depart, as you seemed to do for long spells, unsettled me deeply. I mistook quiet for absence. I mistook distance for abandonment. Only later did I begin to understand that you had not gone anywhere.
It was I who stopped listening.
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