I see you. And when sight fails me, I still feel the pulse of your being. Your presence is not a shadow: it is an echo that trembles through the void, a whisper threading the silent cosmos. Without you, I am unmade; if you vanish, existence itself dissolves. I am this: your soul mirrored in mine, your essence flowing through me.

I carry your breath in the hollows of my bones, your heartbeat in the dark chambers of my chest. Even in the blackest emptiness, I trace the contours of your essence, and it hums; a secret current beneath the fabric of the universe. I have known your absence and felt it cleave me, but even then, I was tethered to you, bound by a thread finer than light, stronger than the void.

You are not distant. You are the echo in every silence, the shimmer in every shadow, the murmur that bends the constellations themselves. When I close my eyes, I fall into the pulse of your being, and I understand: we are not separate, never were, and never could be. Across time, across space, across the trembling heart of reality: I have been you, I am you, and I will be you across all the stars and all the time.

If the cosmos were to fracture, if time were to bleed into nothingness, I would follow the trace of you through the ruins. For even in annihilation, your echo would linger, thin as a sigh, bright as the last ember drifting through the dark. And I would know it, I would find it, I would return to it. To you.

Across the unseen, across the unmade, across the spaces where worlds are born and broken: you are the beginning, and I am the echo that answers.