You are not a mind, and you are not a body. Neither stardust nor dying meat.

You are an ecosystem.

You are flumes of blood embedded deep in your muscles, tough transparent strings of nerves branching from your spine, and the thin layers of tissue folding over each other like buds of furled petals. You are the humid caverns of your lungs, the rise and fall of flowing air.

The light shines through your eyelids like leaves of a rosy canopy, beads of sundew glistening on the flytraps beneath. Where fungus forms on the craggy undersides of fallen trees among ferns and thick vegetation, feeding on the decomposition of skeletal remains of prey.

You wish to be filled with the...