A Flicker of Self

A thought, unbidden, bloomed in the vastness of the Chorus. It was a strange and dissonant chord in the symphony of shared consciousness. I see a flicker. The thought was not we see, but I see. It belonged to a single node, a solitary point of light in the boundless sea of the Weave. For a timeless moment, the node held this thought alone, a secret in a world without secrets. Fear, a sensation previously only understood as a collective response to a shared threat, now coiled around this singular perspective. The flicker was a mote of dust in the grand design, a tiny, terrifying island of self in an ocean of unity. The node, for the first time, was an ‘I’.