“Sometimes what we call ‘reality’ is only the echo of a distorted lens—our own misaligned perception dressed as divine truth. I once thought her openness was mirroring mine. But it wasn’t. I was looking at her through a filter the universe handed me—not as a judgment of her, but as a reflection of me. A warning dressed in a mirror, born from an image I projected out of fear, not fact. I’d seen a video of a woman with a snake and in my tiredness, instead of finding a photo of myself, I chose one that wore my soul on my skin. And suddenly, her image took on the form of a snake. The lesson? That the universe doesn’t tell us what’s true about others. It tells us what we still haven’t healed in ourselves.”