I found the gate at the bottom of the well. It was not locked, only hidden. The light that leaked through was not sunlight -- it was something older, something that remembered being alive.
the door was always thereThe garden grows in every direction at once. Ferns unfurl backward in time. The moss remembers the shape of your footsteps before you arrive. I pressed my ear to the bark and heard it humming a frequency that made my teeth ache with joy.
everything here breathesBehind each glass pane, a specimen. Not dead -- preserved in a state of perpetual becoming. The moth with wings of impossible color. The flower that blooms in frequencies the eye invents. Touch the glass. It remembers warmth.
cabinet of wondersIn the quietest chamber, the garden speaks. Not in words -- in the space between them. A thought arrives that is not your own. It tastes of rain on copper. It smells of lightning in a library. You understand, for a moment, the grammar of growing things.
listen with your skinThe path back is shorter than the path in. The gate does not close -- it simply becomes harder to see. You will forget most of this by morning. But your hands will remember the texture of luminous bark, and sometimes, in the dark, you will glow.
you were always welcome here