The space between, physical and temporal and emotional, provides no final answer, just a hollowness of echoes and where do those abandoned memories go, anyway? There are some things I don't even try to remember and wonder if someday I should, or if all really is for nothing then why not remember nothing. Nothing will reciprocate. Nothing will mediate. Nothing.

All the answers are the same as they have always been. If all we believe is death then all we do is die. The rest is vanity, and what does it profit? What shall it, prophet.

It is a haunted wilderness, a vortex, and there is no sound, no motion, no thought, only the false feeling of spinning, tracking time like a pendulum, decapitating and suspended in the dark water of some cold northern sea. I find no respite in self-inflicted misery. I feel no relief in the catch and painful release of wracking sobs. These eyes of mine squint hard against the blinding fateful chance of future and if I look carefully I can see behind me. That is what I am, was, and will be. It's all there, except ahead of me.

Much has been lost. Most of it will remain beneath the murky cold depths where it slipped to the dream of mermaids. I catch a glimpse of pale green gauze and dark hair and when I blink it changes back into the deep rolling water.

I've been looking for the questions, not the answers. Fragments of silk and eider down and the sickly-sweet breath of dreams, lost and wind-driven, crushed by bootheels, tucked into forgotten desk drawers in dusty old houses. God doesn't expect anyone to have faith in Him but sometimes He hopes, too.


Read Jamie's epiphany.