The Alchemist

Once, I was a cathedral of light, an untamed star spinning in her own orbit. I spoke in songs, laughed in blooms, and carried the world with featherlight ease.

Then came the alchemist, hands cloaked in velvet, words dipped in honeyed ink. He let slip the cracks in his armor, confessed his edges were sharp, his shadows unruly.

But his voice was spun with possibility, his words a delicate mosaic of “what ifs.”

However his tools were shadows, his craft was doubt.

He poured his silence into my veins, watched me twist in the stillness, and called it my impatience.

When I cried, "Do you care?" he tilted his head, a magician without answers, and said, "Strange that you’d ask"

I became a labyrinth of mirrors, each reflection more distorted than the last. My laugh dulled to a hum, my steps faltered on ground that felt like his and never mine. He called me a thinker, as if my mind were a flaw to untangle, as if the questions he planted were weeds of my own making.

And when I stayed, held on to the fragments he scattered, clung to the hope he dangled like a silver thread — he turned his eyes to me and asked,

"How could you let me hurt you?" as though I built the snare, as though he hadn’t woven the push and pull into an addictive rhythm I could not escape.

I began to fold, slowly, like a paper bird in the rain, each crease erasing pieces of me.

When I asked, "Why do you leave me hollow?" he shrugged as though the question were its own answer.

Now, I am the flicker of a candle, a faint smile carved into porcelain. I wonder if my colors were always this pale, if I was ever a star or only a shadow pretending.

And the alchemist? He walks on, hands clean, whistling as though I was his finest work. But he leaves behind a wasteland — my soil salted with doubt, my bloom buried in whispers:

Am I wrong?

Am I all wrong?

— Lux