Encounters Of Illusion

Recognition is the most convincing lie.

The first encounter wasn’t frightening.
That was the detail everyone remembered wrong. There were no alarms, no screaming skies, no sudden understanding of our place in the universe. What we felt instead was recognition — the quiet comfort of seeing something that already knew how to look at us.
They appeared the way expectations do. Not arriving, exactly. Aligning.

Certainty was the real contagion.