17th arrives
with no warning,
no prelude,
no gentle clearing of the throat.
It comes as a sneeze,
a sudden, violent expulsion
from the lungs of a star
too ancient to care
about the consequences.
One sharp burst of light,
one cosmic exhalation,
and everything nearby
is scorched into a memory
of what it once tried to be.
This is not malice.
This is not punishment.
This is stellar biology,
a reflex,
a twitch,
a celestial irritation
that happens to burn
entire metaphysical neighborhoods
in the process.
The sneeze sends everything
spiraling outward,
flung into the far corners
of whatever counts as “hell”
in a universe
that has never agreed
on its definitions.
And as the debris scatters,
as the worlds crack,
as the shadows recoil
from the brightness,
a strange chorus rises,
the blessings
of all the inexistent gods.
Not real gods,
not ruling gods,
not listening gods,
but the imagined ones,
the forgotten ones,
the ones we invented
to make sense of the dark
and then abandoned
when the light became too loud.
They bless the destruction
with the calm indifference
of beings who know
that creation and ruin
are siblings,
not enemies.
April 17th is a day
of cosmic cleansing,
a day when the universe
accidentally wipes the table
and pretends it meant to.
A day when a star sneezes
and the world remembers
how fragile it is,
how temporary,
how beautifully flammable.
And in the glow
of that brief,
blinding eruption,
we see,
for a heartbeat,
that even annihilation
has its own strange grace.
