Sound Before Echo

I Think I’ve Been Reading It Backwards

The hero.
The fall.
The return.

And I would ask:

Where am I in this?

Sometimes it worked.
Sometimes it almost fit.

And sometimes it didn’t—
but I stayed with it anyway.

Because I thought
that’s where meaning began.

But something shifted.

I didn’t find my life in the stories.
I started seeing the stories in my life.

Not as something I entered.

As something that was already happening.

The rise.
The drift.
The return.

Not in a book.
In me.

And I noticed something else.

Everything in the story changes.
But I’m the one it keeps happening to.

It didn’t start when I understood it.
It was there before that.

Before I named it.
Before I looked for it.
Before I tried to make sense of it.

It was already here.

Not because I learned it—
but because I was living it.

I didn’t lose the stories.
I just stopped using them as the lens.

And started recognizing them
as echoes.