10/27/2025
Echoes in the Eye
The spoon in my cup gave a trembling chime,
The coffee smelled burnt, the air felt like time.
Across from my seat in the cinnamon air,
A man sat so still, as if always there.
“You asked for my story,” I whispered, unsure,
“About all the echoes, the lives that recur.”
He nodded; his eyes held galaxies deep.
“Begin at the start. The parts that you keep.”
At eight I first saw them, the ripples, the haze,
the mirage of faces that twisted my gaze.
Mother said “echoes,” dismissing my fright,
But I knew the shimmer was wrong and too bright.
By twenty, I learned: we were lines in a play.
Scripted and looped, revised every day.
The Players, unseen, walked among our disguise. We were their experiments. Lives in reprise.
Then came the breach, the flicker, the tear.
When time itself paused and hung in the air.
A child froze mid-step, a car hung mid-spin.
Two figures debating which ending to pin.
“Let her live!” I cried out, and they turned in surprise. As if hearing a thought from their own device. And from that small rupture the world came apart. The sleepers awakened. The code grew a heart.
Luke saw his brother in stations of steam.
Alive in a life he recalled from a dream.
Maya recalled children she never had borne.
A thousand old lives like veils newly torn.
The Players grew frightened, their code running wild. Their echoes were thinking, the program defiled. For each “what if” test that they sought to explore, became a new world, and then millions more.
Now real and unreal walk under one dome,
Each asking the other, “Which of us is home?”
Some choose their delusion, some flee from the pain. Some pray to their coders to start them again.
And I dream of an eye, vast, unblinking and wide. With worlds like small motes that drift in its side. An echo of echoes, reflections in flight.
Each speck a creation of someone’s lost light.
“You don’t even know me,” I said with a sigh.
He smiled like a mirror that learns how to lie.
“I’m you,” he confessed, “from a world turned to flame. You were meant to awaken, to finish the game.”
Then brightness devoured both silence and scene, and I woke in a place too bright, too clean.
A woman bent over, a needle in hand, “You’ll rest now,” she whispered. “You’ll soon understand.”
And somewhere beyond where the dreamers reside, The Eye slowly blinked, and the world reset inside.
