Let’s get bare, all out, leaving what’s true and told, nothing to add or fix. the story ends here. A chapter played to the best of its capacity, nothing better or new will come from it. Cords severed gently, no fuss, loosened knots, we’re closing up the tent. Built, used, and spent, we have several humidity stains, a few cracks, and some peeled walls. We’re weathered and salted by all of it, and aware: we must complete the other half of the tale, and we want to.
People have slipped away without too much racket, maybe a few grunts here and there. Regrets finally put on their proper shelves, memories found a trap door to come and go with dignity. We own nothing, we’re guests, administrators in a way, creating environments conducing to many tomorrows; lives that must be lived toward horizons our gaze might never touch. We cannot fathom it yet, all that will unfold, but this is us now, and it is its own perfection.
We are enough, we’re servants, travelers, but never tourists, because we are beyond the randomness. Our steps are as real as the symbols revealed in Earth’s breath, in the utterance of her animals, her windy spirits amongst the trees, her changing patterns in the clouds. Totemic visitors appear in our dreams, summer nights quiver, flashing messages in the sky. Our bodies tremble, they are vessels in the process of a change in voltage.
We are taking the back road now, where the mother turns to crone. She walks by herself, stripping away what she believed she ought to carry, of what she could never fully trust to bloom right. It’s our turn, abated of defense, security, as bare as when young and gleefully ignorant, left only with the choice to trust or wither away like a disposed carcass.
Disrobed, left in our flaccidity, our weakened joints, we recognize, we accept, it’s us, the next preface to hundreds, maybe thousands of stories into the future, where we might still remain, in her whispers amongst the leaves.