We fell, she and all of I, bloodied and grappling and crashing through dimensions, genders, wars, and karma. It was reaching the salt flat that stopped our flight or fall. On impact we broke apart and rolled away in the shallow water, salty tears and echoing promises from authors and readers to never fall prey again.

Her poison coursed through me from the spider bite just over my heart, burning what little of me I had been able to recover. I lay close to drowning, wheezing just over the saltwater, cycling through ages: I flickered as I turned thirty-six, then twelve, eight, twenty-three, sixteen, four, versions of myself broken by video tracking lines and tachycardia. I couldn’t stand but I felt her eight legs carry her to me, lower her human torso toward me to pick me up and dissolve me into her.

But the light in the interminable expanse was so like the sky when the I that was twelve was violently driven from her home, and so like the bellflower blue in the heart of the I of thirty-nine years. And in a pained exhale the chakras of all versions of me were alight and shooting a familiar golden beam through the length of me and into the expanse, calling out for who all of I had always been but had long forgotten.

It was She who was I and I once was, answering my call, crowned and adorned in gold, swathed in Caribbean blue and rays of gold radiating from her back like wings. It was She also I who hovered above me, opened her arms, and shimmered with strength, hands iridescent fists at her sides. Her eyes of forgotten and reclaimed light glowed toward the spider-bodied shadows that had swallowed my mother, and she--who is also They--recoiled.

She who was I bid the air bring me before her, and hugged all of us who are me from behind, unperturbed by the multidimensional scroll of my existence. When the wheels of time stopped at twelve and thirty-nine, She who was I removed her golden crown and placed it on my preteen head.

“You who are I have always deserved love,” She who was I whispered in celestial bells that took on other voices echoing through aeons, affection glowing at me through other eyes and rays of light shooting through the full clouds.

And though all I could do was smile through pubescent tears falling down a middle-aged face, a hand on my heart and another on the arm of Her who was me began closing the hole through my chest, and opened a door I long thought was but a childhood delusion.