“You filed because you were brave,” she continues. “Not because you were certain.”
My hands shake. I curl them into fists.
“Sometimes it feels like I’m always balancing between being too much and not enough.”
“There it is.”
I feel her attention sharpen. The garden seems to hold its breath around us.
“You were told you were too loud, too intense, too precise,” she says. “Too sensitive. Too sharp for some, too soft for others. So you carved yourself smaller. But you also built structures so sound others stand on them without realizing who laid the foundation.”
My breath stutters.
This is not the clinical gaze of academia. Not the cautious empathy of therapy. Not the shallow curiosity of colleagues who want to “understand autism better” so they can congratulate themselves.
This feels like being understood at the level of pattern.
“You are not too much,” she says. “And you are not not enough. You are precisely shaped for what you are becoming.”
My eyes burn. I look away.
“And what am I becoming?” My voice is barely sound.
She spreads her hands, gold and shadow cascading. “That is yours to uncover. Not mine to dictate.”
I steady myself. “You said I moved the wheel. What does that mean?”
“You stepped out of the groove they prepared for you,” she says. “You refused the script. The wheel favors those who refuse to vanish.”
“That sounds bigger than what I did.”
“You see one spoke,” she says. “I see the whole.”
Silence stretches. A thought rises before I can stop it.
“Is this… only about my work?”
She goes still in a way that feels like a smile.
“There is another turning you pretend not to examine.”
Heat floods my face. “I don’t—”
“You prefer logic to longing,” she says. “You hope equations will solve what the heart complicates.”
I swallow. “If you’re implying—”
“I imply nothing,” she says. “I state only this: The road ahead need not be a lonely one.”
My heart gives a violent, traitorous pulse.
She doesn’t elaborate. Of course she doesn’t.
“You do not have to choose today,” she says. “Not a place. Not a person. Not a destiny. You must only refuse to disappear.”
A long breath shudders out of me.
“Why me?” I ask. “Why appear to me?”
