A Jagged Absence

As we ventured further in, we stopped to bury each of them with care.

Wrapped gently in grief, they were lowered into the cold earth and covered with loose soil. Each time, the younger one found a stone, or a gnarled branch, and left it behind as an offering, a token for those removed.

The way ahead grows dark. The light from above stopped reaching us some time ago. We made no mark of when, no memory to retrieve.

We still see here.

Everything rests below black towering trees, the undergrowth lit by a dwindling source none of us can find. We stopped searching for it. We stopped wondering how this place works.

We persist here, only moving further in, away from what lay behind.

There is no returning to a place we no longer know, no longer remember.

Yet we can still see our destination. Coalescing inside what remains of our mind’s eye, there is the same vision: dark, folding water. Black sand and bleached driftwood. We will make our home there, listening to the restful music where the water meets the night.

We no longer need warmth, or light.

The tonal water will guide us, and sustain us.

Each of them is buried as we go.

When one is given free, they are removed carefully, but quickly, before the stillness can spread. The stillness is our enemy. The stillness is our love. It is part of us. It binds us together and carries us forward. And if we do not reach the place where the water mingles with the night, it will consume us.

Whenever one is removed, we feel ourselves become less. A weight is given back to what burrows in the earth. And each departure leaves a jagged absence where memory used to be.

We remember less of time.

We know less of ourselves.

The vision begins to fade.

The black water grows harder to imagine. The shoreline blurs and muddles. The driftwood is swallowed by shifting sand.

With each of them we bury, the chance grows that we will wander here until every one of us has been carved away.

Until nothing remains but stillness.

There are times, when we leave one behind, we wonder if it is us who was severed and given to the earth. And we wonder what will remain that still moves forward.

And we fear what may come, a final interval when the last of us arrives at the water, only to discover there is no one left who remembers why we came.

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