LIFT

Before anything begins, silence appears.
Not the ordinary one you know —
the other one, the deeper one,
the one that isn’t the absence of sound,
but the place where sound could be born,
if it wished to.
You breathe slowly,
not because you must,
but because everything around you
moves at a pace
as if it were speaking your name
without using any letters.
Inside,
something opens.
First a millimetre,
then a little more,
until suddenly you feel
that a space forms within you —
quiet, soft,
without pressure.
You do not rise,
and yet you no longer feel
the weight that was yours.

The space begins to read you.
Gently.
Line by line,
as if checking
where you end
and where the thing that carries you
begins.
Nothing accelerates,
and yet beneath the skin
the first trembling appears,
very subtle,
like a faint impulse passing
through quiet light.
The darkness before your eyes
is not darkness.
It is not a background.
It is a space
that has only just been born
and does not yet know
what shape it should take.
You drift within it,
not forward,
not downward,
but into the depth of something
that has no directions.

TRANSIT

In this darkness
there is something else.
A shadow of sensing you cannot name,
but which begins to arrange itself
like a very quiet calling.
The silence within you deepens.
It does not grow louder,
but wider,
as if someone had moved the walls of the universe
one breath farther out.
The subtle trembling returns —
at first barely perceptible,
like the shadow of a light
that has not yet decided
whether it wants to be seen.
And then slowly
it becomes presence.
Something in the space shifts.
Very gently,
as if an invisible mechanism
had clicked into a new place.

And you drift into this shift
without trying to follow,
because you cannot follow something
that does not move in time.
A first pulse appears in the darkness.
It does not shine —
it trembles.
Like the heart of a star
just beginning to remember
that it knows how to shine.
A second pulse.
A third.
A fourth.
The space adjusts its weight,
revealing a layer
you did not know
was there.
And then
the softness that carried you at the beginning
starts to dissolve
into something far greater.

Silence absorbs these lights
and returns them,
each one slightly brighter,
as if the space were learning
how to breathe.
At a certain moment
it is no longer you who moves.
It is the darkness that flows toward you,
like a river without water,
like a wind without air.
You breathe in a rhythm
that does not belong
to this world.

DRIFT

The space expands.
Effortless.
Without a destination.
Without a when.
Awareness stretches so far
that you forget
where an idea ends
and where you begin.
Galaxies that do not yet exist
tremble beneath the skin of space
like thoughts
just before their birth.
Everything grows.
Quietly.
Vastly.
Calmly.
You are not moving through the cosmos.
It is the cosmos
that moves through you.
Time loses meaning.
Directions dissolve.
Movement becomes unnecessary.

And then something happens —
something impossible,
and yet completely obvious.

THE SHIFT

A fracture.
So subtle
it feels as though space has misplaced its own calculation
and recovered it
in another place
that does not exist.
For a fraction of time
that isn’t there,
everything around you
moves by an invisible width,
as if the cosmos
were breathing in a rhythm
not its own.
One thought —
not yours,
not the space’s:
“You have been here before.”
And everything returns
to a state it never left.
You only feel
that from this moment on
silence has a new shape.

THRESHADOW

The lights withdraw.
They do not fade.
They do not disappear.
They return to the place
from which they came.
The space smooths itself.
It does not become empty —
it becomes a fullness
that needs nothing
beyond itself.
The last breath of light
dissolves into silence.
That very delicate something returns,
the one you could never name.
Like the shadow of a motion
that happened once,
but whose memory
cannot bear its weight.
Time thins out.
Movement vanishes.
Direction dissolves.

Only a point remains,
though it is not a point —
a place
where the universe
makes room for you.
Silence reveals its own interior.
The breath becomes the shadow of a breath.
And then
everything disappears,
so that
for the first time,
it may show you
what has always been hidden
beneath the light.

RE-ENTRY

When the space returns to motion,
it does so so quietly
that the change is almost impossible to see.
Weight returns as a memory.
Shapes learn again
how to accept their own boundaries.
The body
appears as something
that does not ask for attention,
yet receives it.
This is not a return.
It is a landing.
Gentle.
Soft.
As if the earth,
instead of waiting,
had come to you.
And when all of this closes,
something remains.

AFTERGLOW

Silence lingers
a moment longer
than it should,
like a delicate light
hovering in the air
after a flame has gone out.
You don’t know
whether it is the echo of the journey
or the beginning of something new.
You allow it to be.

RESIDUE

And when the afterglow settles,
a shadow remains.
Not the kind that casts shapes,
but the kind
that remembers them.
Somewhere deep,
beneath what is familiar,
a thin thread trembles.
It says nothing.
It calls for nothing.
It explains nothing.
It only reminds you
that the space
you visited
is not located outside.
It is a place
that from now on
you carry
within you.

THRESHADOW MAP

LIFT
↓
TRANSIT
↓
DRIFT
↓
THE SHIFT
↓
THRESHADOW
↓
RE-ENTRY
↓
AFTERGLOW
↓
RESIDUE

Here silence ends its path.
The rest is only light.
— Michal Klimonda