Of ash and echo
Somewhere, deep in the fibres of things, there it is again, the shape of what never arrived.
I am made of questions I cannot resolve.
In ash and echo a thumb presses into soft skin. The light is gone and divinity remains, but I don’t understand how. It’s the back of the blade pressing. Not even the hope of piercing through. No blood, only a shimmer where it might have been. My breath catches on something older than pain. Older than our stories. How can that be. Older than that. Yes. The body remembers the weight.
What’s left is ruin. Where the wound could have lived. Where the world could have stayed. But you sealed the doors. Somewhere beneath my density a different language tries to interpret itself. How does one survive such subtraction? How do we grow in the absence of heat? And still, bow to the thumb, to that blade, to the flesh that stays.
The ground opened but didn’t swallow me, and now the silence owns the threshold. Even the void has teeth and memory. Is this future’s temple? No. Alchemy of what no longer is? No. Enlightened presence? Also, no. The Gods have long stopped answering. Even when we changed the label to High Priestess. Why? You know why. Because we were just playing dress up.
Pregnant with rain and unable to be induced, I place my ear to the scar. There’s no triumph. Only a slow turning toward what couldn’t be changed. And the harrowing lack of grace about still being here. You’ve forgotten me. The ceremony stalled mid-incantation, the chalice untouched and whatever was meant to ascend or descend, didn’t. Or worse… it did, and found no one home. The template still twitches in the shape of the offering, but the altar’s gone cold. And the eye, if it ever watched, has turned its gaze to quieter disasters. This is what comes after devotion starves and myth curdles in the mouth. See… what lives here doesn’t ask to be healed, so just leave it in distortion.
Notice that something stands in the hollow where your recognition should be. Not a self. Not a soul. Not even the soft edges of grief. Something crude. Like the sound of bones finally remembering to breathe without cracking. Exhale then and be highly suspect of anything that suggests rebirth or meaning, and deny that which can be made metaphor. It wants the space beneath naming. The gesture before intention. The taste of salt before the ocean existed.
Once, I thought collapse was the final movement. Smash into the abyss, compost, reform. You said the mother tongue spoke in seasons. You made it oracular. You said be the light, become the torch, and what… the torturer?
This scene after the last darkness falls, when everyone has left and the stone begins to creak. The soil whispering each footfall, in the ether the voices of those who vanished mid-line. And somewhere, deep in the fibres of things, there it is again, the shape of what never arrived. The tool without utility. The ache without response. The flame with no purpose. I remembered the name, but I can’t make it into matter or plan or poetry. And I certainly cannot make it into a person.
The silence shifts. Ever so slightly, as if considering I’m worth answering now
that I’ve stopped asking.