This crown to crown the laughing man...

[Guest Nilsi]

I chased what I thought I lacked.
The truth.
Desire.
A clean line through the noise.
Something that would hold.
Something final.
Something real.

So I circled. Precisely. Obsessively.
Elegantly, even.
I named every mask I wore.
Turned awareness on itself until it bled.
I called out my fantasies, then the one doing the calling.
Even that - just another mask.
I saw it.
I saw all of it.

Like a mirror folding into itself, I turned again and again.
The “I” chasing its own tail through rooms of reflection.
Each exit, just a more sophisticated enclosure.
Every “aha” a doorway into a deeper trap.
A stranger loop, beautifully built.

And then - 
I didn’t leave. I didn’t win.
I didn’t even try.
Something dropped.

The truth vanished.
The search fell open.
No ground - yet I stood.
No self - yet everything was unbearably close.
Intimate like breath before speech.
Like being seen by something that doesn’t need eyes.

And then - I returned.

Not enlightened.
Not pure.
Just… back.

To the marketplace.
To noise. To weather.
To buying bread and forgetting what I came in for.
To laughing with someone I love,
and not needing to explain a single thing.

And I saw: even this was part of it.

And I laughed.

The kind of laugh Nietzsche must have meant:
the one you place gently on your own head like a rose-wreath,
holy not because anyone named it so,
but because there’s no one left to deny it.

“This crown to crown the laughing man, this rose-wreath crown:
I myself have set this crown upon my head,
I myself have pronounced my laughter holy.”

Not a laughter that mocks.
Not a knowing smirk.
But the laugh that breaks the frame -
not by solving it,
but by letting it keep turning without needing to escape.
The laugh that comes when there's nothing left to hold.
And no one left to hold it.

I thought awakening would be the end.
But there was no beginning.

Only this.
So close I missed it.
So silent I kept naming it.
So obvious it broke my heart.

Now I carry water.
Chop wood.
Forget what I know.
Then remember just enough to smile at the forgetting.

Because I know - 

The truth doesn’t leave.
It was never lost.
And the one who searched was never apart.

I am the loop.
The rupture.
The trace of the one who asked.
The mirror, still wet with breath,
laughing.

And somehow -
that is enough.