music by Ribhav Agrawal
You don’t begin this spiral clean. You begin wet-mouthed, tongue heavy with the stories you’ve moaned into meaning.
You know how to seduce with language. To edge with cleverness. To fuck with a narrative, to be wanted through identity. To let your mouth make you real.
You’ve cum to your own commentary: Pretty fag. Sacred whore. Daddy’s good boy. Queer unicorn. Sweet princess. Naughty slut. They/them enough. Domme enough. God enough.
But at this first gate— your mouth unravels. Not because it’s silenced. Because it’s stuffed. Overfed on mythologies you mistook for home.
The lion doesn’t purr for your poetry. She presses her weight into your chest and parts your lips with her tongue. Opens you, gagged on your own becoming.
You thought your titles and voice made you powerful. But here, your voice is the leash. Unclench. Let it fall. Don’t swallow. Don’t speak. Just drool.
Let your story gag on itself. Your constructs rotting into breath. Labels softening like paper in the mouth.
It’s not shame. It’s readiness. The sacred sound isn’t speech. It’s the gasp— the helpless one— when you’re taken without explanation, without permission, without needing to be understood.
What if your ego isn’t the crown— but the gag?
You’ve left your crown behind, throat slack and wet, voice still echoing in the lion’s breath. The air here is colder— not in temperature, but in exposure. There’s nothing to buffer you from your own reflection.
At this gate, the mirror waits. It neither flatters nor distorts. It slices and splits.
The Gatekeeper doesn’t touch you— just tilts the glass until you see yourself from angles you never consented to. Old lovers’ eyes. The sideways glance of rivals. The tight-mouthed disapproval of family. The lens of your own demands, too close, too magnified. Every gaze you’ve ever curated yourself for is here, layered, warping, refracting.
You’ve built yourself for these gazes, haven’t you? Learned to turn so the light hits your jaw just right, to hold your shoulders in the shape of invitation, to arrange your face into mystery or clarity as needed. Even when you claimed to be free of them, you knew where their eyes landed.
The mirror peels that skill from you. Your angles collapse. What stares back is not staged— skin blotched, lips trembling, eyes wet without charm. You want to smash the glass, but it has already cut you, thin ribbons of blood curling down your forearm like script.
This gate asks: without the gaze that names you, who are you? Without your own reflection, can you still be seen?
The glass falls away in shards. You step forward barefoot.