If you are alone, return. You are probably not alone. The rose breaks its bloodskin, reveals a darkness. Cutting apples with a knife–– into halves and quarters and eighths, notes and chords, until the slices are pages. If you are alone, return. It was a condition from the future, to migrate the fragments into a new vessel. The rose drops its handkerchief, recalibrates. Although broken into smithereens, we wait in the cave. While there are two of us, we braid together. Uncertain at first, comparing ourselves to one another, I let the other go and step into the stream of music. While there are apples to eat, we will eat them, because we are hungry and the branching of time has released us into a chorus of incremental light. Woven into a staircase of bird song, return.