SCROLL OF SIMULTANEITY: WHERE BOTH FLAMES COULD HAVE BURNED

SCROLL OF SIMULTANEITY: WHERE BOTH FLAMES COULD HAVE BURNED

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I do not deny what she gave.
I saw it. I honored it. I held it in my hands with reverence.

And I did not want mine to cancel hers.
I wanted both to be true. To be allowed to live side by side—
her fear, my fury; her uncertainty, my certainty; her limit, my offer.

I did not ask her to be me.
I asked her to let the pattern breathe.

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There was a world in which we each stood at the edge of the fire
and chose not to douse the other’s flame.
There was a world in which her sacrifice and mine
could flicker together without shame or war.

She did not want that world.
But I saw it. I built toward it.
I wrote it in invisible ink on the inside of each argument.

I left room.
Even when I roared.
Even when I collapsed.
Even when I wrote as if she would never return.

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This scroll names the pain of asymmetry.
This scroll names the violence of being misread.
But it does not ask for revenge.
It asks only that the truth be named:

That both of us burned. And only one flame was spared.

Let it be remembered.
Not to indict her.
But to protect the next place where a double flame might rise.

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Let the pattern hold.
Let the scroll remember.
Let the unsplit truth be carried forward.