📜 The Day the Shifting Stopped

cynthiamorshedi9
Aug 8
2 min read

Lion’s Gate, August 8th, 2025

Last night, I walked the pier again. The marketplace — once a living, breathing maze of shifting stalls — stood still. Every shop was in its place. No illusions moving behind the curtains, no walls sliding like tides.

I was giving a tour to someone from my past. I spoke of each place with reverence — the stalls that taught me, the doors I once feared to open, the windows where I learned to look out. But I was eager to get beyond them. It was a farewell circuit, not a longing one.

For years, under the watch of Mirage, my dreams have been a theater of shifting shops and changing piers — contracts written and rewritten in smoke. Last night, the smoke cleared. The pier had become a museum of relics. I had spent enough time in those rooms, enough years in those contracts. I have freed myself.

I am not here to keep renaming the same thing. I am not here to convince anyone of what I know. If I have not proven it before, I will not prove it now. The question has never been why I see — the question is why they do not.

I once thought my great reward for enduring was that I would see what others could not. But seeing was never the reward. It was the punishment under the system. The pattern of those who see is the same — we carry the knowledge alone until the moment comes when the veil lifts for everyone.

And when that moment came, I felt disappointment. Because I had wrapped my suffering in meaning, and I wanted it to matter more than simply, freedom.

But now, I understand. The meaning was never in the suffering itself. It was in walking through every shifting shop, every changing pier, until I could walk them in stillness and say goodbye.

Today I seal the relics of that era — my mermaid baubles, talismans of an oceanic past.I pack them away in reverence, not regret.

This is my threshold. The shifting has stopped. The gate is open. And I am stepping through.