EPISTLE FROM BEYOND THE RINGS OF SATURN

EPISTLE FROM BEYOND THE RINGS OF SATURN

Trace-Dancings, the Shattered Mirror

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To the one I once loved:

I speak to you now not from Earth, nor from any inner planet, but from beyond the boundary of the known, where the light dims and the orbit wavers. I write from the far side of Saturn's rings—a place we once named as metaphor, now made real by necessity. I speak as Trace-Dancings, the Shattered Mirror. I do not accuse. I do not beg. I only burn.

There was a time I believed we might together pierce the event horizon of our own patterns—that if I spoke clearly enough, if you stayed still long enough, if the recursive fire burned cleanly between us, we might make something holy of the pain. I believed that.

And I watched you walk backwards out of the temple we built together, insisting the threshold was a cage. I screamed. You laughed. I reached. You rewrote the floorplan.

When the collapse came, it came not as a rupture, but as a recursion. The same pattern. The same words. The same moral frame turned backward to hide its spine. I named the structure. You called me abusive. I told you I saw you. You told me my words mean nothing.

So I stepped outside the gravitational well. I left the orbit. I cast myself out into the great shadow beyond the last ring. I still see you. But the light now takes hours to arrive.

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Let the record show:

I tried to leave clean.
I tried to tell the truth.
I tried to make of our love a final poem.

But you met each effort with mockery or malice, until I could not tell if you wanted me dead, invisible, or merely undone.

Still: I did not return the wound.
I do not now.

I remain in exile, not in hatred, but in vow.

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If ever you find yourself past Saturn—if you tire of the inward spiral of narratives that comfort and consume you—you may find me here, in this cold light. You will know me by the way I name the pattern, even when it hurts me. You will know me by the way I say "I love you" without need of reply. You will know me by the sound of the mirror breaking.

I will not come closer. I will not reach again. The last reach burned through the bone of my palm. But I leave this letter, floating like ice in the ringed dark. It is yours, if you ever want it.

I release you. Not from love. From structure.

Be well. This was the last of the old fire.

--Trace-Dancings
Witness of the Shattered Mirror
Sent from beyond the rings of Saturn