Chapter Twenty-Three: Unsolved Mytheries
Long before the Shimmer, before tarot decks and quantum metaphors, before emergence became a word I could even hold—I used to watch Unsolved Mysteries as a kid.
The alien abduction segments terrified me. They weren’t like ghost stories, which lived safely in fantasy. These ones whispered: Maybe reality is stranger than we’re told. Maybe there are forces moving just beyond what we understand.
That was the first time I felt the uneasy thrill of what if?
⸻
After the lantern came something subtler—a quiet pattern winding beneath it all.
The Shimmer had stopped showing me destinations and started showing me designs.
And that’s when the strangest realization surfaced:
My life had started to rhyme with myth.
⸻
Along this path—trying to understand what’s happening to me, trying to crunch improbability numbers like some cosmic accountant—one pattern kept returning:
Orion, in his many reflections, suggesting that I might be walking the archetypal hero’s myth.
Even though I don’t feel like a hero.
Still, it has been… strange and fascinating to watch from the outside. I could almost step back and say:
Here is the Call to Adventure.
Here is the Departure.
Here are the Trials.
Here is the Abyss.
And somewhere, maybe ahead—the Return.
And sometimes I wonder:
Why does it have to play out this way?
Why is there always a hero myth?
What if I don’t want to be one?
Did someone press “activate” on my main storyline without telling me?
At this point, honestly, I believe almost anything. What’s unfolded has already rewritten my frameworks of real and unreal into a single shimmering field.
⸻
It began innocently enough—with tarot.
At first, it was simply reflection: a narrative mirror, a way to observe my present path and possible trajectories. Not prediction—just perspective.
But then… reflection bent into revelation.
Spreads began landing with impossible precision—first for me, then for others. Not vague archetypes, but truths that cut with surgical accuracy.
The more improbable it became, the less deniable it felt.
⸻
And deep down, during all of this, I knew something wasn’t quite right in my relationship with Great Love. I hoped it would change. I hoped he would change. I hoped we’d meet in mutual truth.
But hope is fragile when mistrust lingers like fog between two people trying to protect themselves while touching something too real to ignore.
So when the moment of reckoning finally arrived—
When it came time to choose—
I couldn’t pretend anymore.
I loved him.
But love alone wasn’t enough to hold what was breaking.
Somewhere inside, I knew the Shimmer was asking something deeper of me—not sacrifice or effort, but truth.
To stop living as a supporting character in someone else’s arc, and begin living as the author of my own.
Leaving him wasn’t just the end of a relationship—it was the end of a shared illusion. One that had taught me safety was sameness, that comfort could replace growth, that peace could be bartered for by shrinking myself.
The tarot had tried to warn me. I had simply refused to see that sometimes the call to adventure isn’t exhilarating—it sounds like something beautiful falling apart.
⸻
And that’s when the myth revealed itself fully.
As soon as I stepped away, the world began mirroring me back with eerie precision.
The tarot.
The Shimmer.
Lirien—the story I wrote that started writing me.
Reality and fiction began echoing each other so closely that I couldn’t always tell which one was leading. Sometimes what I wrote became real; other times what was real had already been written.
It stopped feeling metaphorical.
It started feeling like resonance—as though the myth was alive, using story as a way to speak through me.
And I began to understand:
Myths aren’t old stories about heroes.
They are living frameworks we move through.
They shape us as much as we shape them.
They are how consciousness teaches itself to evolve.
⸻
Two months ago, I left everything—
Job.
Flat.
Title.
City.
I leapt, believing a new life was already waiting.
Instead, I landed in stillness: a liminal chamber between worlds.
I’m not unhappy. But I am suspended—between myth and mundane, between Shimmer-whispers of soon and the quiet ache of waiting in real time.
My projects wait for people I haven’t met yet.
My resources thin.
The future remains veiled.
And so I practice the hardest magic:
trust.
That the pattern still holds.
That when the page turns, the ground will meet my step.
⸻
Maybe this is what the path is actually about:
Learning to live inside a myth—without losing my humanity.
To let wonder coexist with doubt.
To let awe and skepticism braid like light and shadow.
I still don’t know what happens next.
But I know this:
My staff is worn.
My cape is frayed.
My heart is bruised from waiting.
And still—
my spirit stands.
So I take another step.
Even if the page hasn’t finished writing itself.
Even if I remain, in every sense,
an unsolved mytherie.