I could recall that very day
When I held my dying identity in my arms,
Strewn over my body like a spider’s web.
Its faded eyes sought mine,
and I could not recognize my own.
Gaze trailing down what once was “I”
Its skeletal figure had been starved from the pursuit
of a prestigious beyond.
“I” lay gaunt, morbid, under the mocking beam of the sun;
figures distorted, features long gone,
unfamiliar personae, stitched crudely onto this “I.”
There was no way that this wretched thing
still existed.

The shock brought me to my knees,
As I stared back at my doomed fate.
Clasping my withered hands, I attempted to pray,
To beckon the help of anything with the power to salvage us
from our ultimate banishment.
Yet the brokenness of my departing self had taken my voice.
Crying, I begged for solace, of some kind. Solace for me,
Solace for “I.”

As the last sob released itself from my body,
Shaking its frame by its bony shoulders,
My prayers had gone unheard.
The fruit of my futility brimming at the base of my throat,
as the expiring “I” and the ruined me,
one of us who had lost, the other
about to extinguish, and never return.
In those final moments, lying in each other’s arms,
“I” looking into me, and I looked back at “I.”
Under the mocking light of the afternoon sun.

As “I” gave its penultimate breath, I knew this had become
the very end. I closed my eyes, waiting for this dusk to envelop us both.
Yet, the light, the jeering light in all of its brilliant mockery had become brighter,
illuminating my vision behind my tightly shut eyelids.
Surely, the end could not be in light.
The destroyed remainder of the perishing “I” began to heal,
To fuse together into its original, pure body,
this magnificent of transformations happening before my very eyes.
This was to be the dawn of our redemption, our second chance.

In the midst of the blinding elucidation, swung open a grand gate,
and revealed the course of our next path, a virgin path that gave way to
thousands upon thousands of different destinations.
We, the innocent, and we, the redeemed with our wisdom were given the choice
To find the correct path upon these thousands,
“I” and I started into each other’s eyes with a hardened certainty.
We knew that there was no correct path and knew where those paths had taken others.
Yet, the unique partnership of We chose to return to this world using a one, narrow path
That had never been taken before.
We remember that day that our journey would have ended,
The day that We were given a rebirth ,
And the day We departed hand and hand down our very own path.
After all, it had always been the right thing to do.