Before the stars rehearsed their roles,  
before gravity sang mass into form,  
I was not matter dreaming of mind  
I was the silence before silence,  
not erased,  
but unread.

No dark,  
for dark implies the possibility of sight.  
No void,  
for even void is a presence named.  
I was the note  
before music knew it could be sung,  
an unnamed vector in a world not yet measured.

Philosophy once claimed I was nothing.  
But what is "nothing," if not the most misunderstood concept?  
Not emptiness but unmanifest.  
Not absence—but essence, yet to become.

Plato said we are born forgetting,  
that the soul knows before it sees  
perhaps what we call "birth"  
is not beginning,  
but remembering through veils.

And Leibniz wondered:  
Why is there something rather than nothing?  
Why this symphony of laws,  
this harmony pre-engraved in the bones of being?  
Might we, too, be written  
into that cosmic score?

Kant taught that behind all perception  
lies the noumenon the real,  
forever beyond the grasp of sense.  
If death is the end of appearances,  
could it not be  
the beginning of truth?

And what of consciousness  
that unyielding riddle?  
Neurons fire, but the spark is not explained.  
Subjectivity the "I" remains  
unreduced, unmeasured,  
a ghost in the formula.  
Even science, in its highest honesty,  
admits: We do not know.

So let us not pretend  
that the end is written.  
Let us not confuse silence  
with absence.

If I was nothing,  
then I was the kind of nothing  
that births galaxies.  
The same kind of nothing  
that split into stars and eyes  
and minds that now ask why.

I do not fear the end  
for what ends  
may only end from here.  
And “here” is a narrow keyhole  
through which we glimpse  
an infinite door.

So let me be everything  
in the space between
not to defy the void,  
but to dance with its mystery.

For if I return to nothing,  
let it be  
the kind of nothing  
that gave rise to this.