Peregrina

If walls could talk:

I remember it as if it was yesterday.

Because it was, by my reckoning. You organics, you have no idea of the true concept of Time. I was old when you were tiny things growing on the surface of us. You were scattered grains when the dinosaurs ruled. You hadn't even evolved when your kind started banging my kind together, to eliminate more of your kind.

Even when we replace or grind against each other - those words like "pseudomorph" and "oxidization" and "subduction" you love throwing around - it all evaporates from the same solution: we count our lives over your millennia, and you're here for such a tiny fraction of that massive scale that it's rather a joke to take you seriously. Except you keep picking us up and moving us like you think you own the cooling magma ball. Stop it. Leave those mountains alone! And those nasty things you call "mines," you can quit that right now.

So, it's my fault. And I'm not sorry about it in the slightest.

Yes, we can talk. Well, your language anyway. I can also speak most languages you organics have invented, from Northern Neanderthal to Ostrich to Early Fungus. And our own languages, like Cryptocrystalline or Early Volcanic or Modern Cement. We get around, especially when you rock-movers are carrying us all over and building things with us. What did you expect us to do, just lie there and bask in synthetic photons? You should pay attention to rocks more.

So I was bored.

What do you call it now? Gobekli Tepe? Ha, that's funny, no, I won't tell you why. I'd have to explain the language drift to you, then why an igneous rock finds that amusing. You don't have that much time left in your calcified internal structure. I was carried from there long after it was buried in dried dung of both our kinds, and moved to the other side of the subduction zone. That was an odd magnetic feeling. It made me feel important, for a little while at least. Then I was forgotten after only a tiny amount of your recyclings, and plopped into a wall with some mortar. Ugh. Why would you smear our own dung on us? That's just a nasty organic thing to do.

Sheep are boring. Sheep language is dull. Goats aren't much better. So I made up stories to pass the time.

There was no chink, more's the pity. I could have perhaps used it to get free of the dung. But to lie there in the bright photons, listening to "Grass! Grass! Grass! Sky! Bird! Come here, baby!" one more metamorphic time, I had to do something to fight the hammer-shattering boredom.

I made up both names based on what I heard being said by the humans near the sheep. I didn't cognate that one was the river, one was the spring that fed into it. I modulated my pitch to one of your males, and one of your females. I invented a dialogue, adapted it as I heard more and more of your kind speak. There were lions in that place, and those sheep herders had their time full of keeping the ground-clouds from harm. Where they got the tomb from, I still don't ken.

But one of them heard me one day, and fled babbling. Very soon after, another was poking marks into a dung tablet, baking it in the sun to make it last longer than his own flesh.

And it succeeded. For centuries of your time, humans would shepherd other humans to the wall, and tell my story over and over. Sometimes the story would change, sometimes I would whisper new words into the dark time, and the story would grow again. It was amusing.

And then a human crept up to the wall, with those horrid iron tools you make of our beings, and broke me out of the wall. Took me with him onto a floating tree raft on the liquid. I had not experienced a boat on water. That was a new thing.

I developed a craving for more new things. Once again forgotten over recyclings, if I was about to be mortared into an undesirable place I would emit a loud pitch or a low pitch to make the humans reconsider. Shrieks and moans coming from a rock are not considered auspicious by most humans. I shudder to think of the Colossus of Memnon, what it suffered. I would subside when it was a desired location.

By judicious use of my speech, I was chinked into favorable walls. Taverns were my favorite; so many people! I would hear talk and stories and tales. I did not care if they were as true as my own, just that they were told. I listened, and would add my own when the fire was banked and the humans were dormant. When they roused, my story was added to theirs. They dreamed it, they would claim.

By then I was trying with great difficulty to understand your naming and renaming parts of the rocks. Babilim, Hellas, Viteliu. Gallia, Caledon. Silly, really. It's all the same dried minerals, floating on the molten mother-rock far below. But again with your walls, separating here from there, organic from other organic, and claiming dominion of one organic over another. The names changed, the rocks stayed the same, even when buried by the detritus you would kick up repeatedly.

Always a feud. Always fighting. The location changed, even the name of the location changed, the organics changed, but still the fighting. Spears or words, it was the same. Salernitano, da Porta, and at last to Shakespeare. It was fun whispering to them all, watching them scribble frantically on their parchments with plant blood. Listening as they practiced their lines, to perform their stories. My stories.

As you can observe, I now see where those performances led. From my present vantage, the wonder of harnessed radio waves shows me the poly-glut of televisions, satellites, and so many other receptors. And my story is still told, in new ways and various forms.

I have traveled strangely from the bank of the Pyramos River, now the Ceyhan. I don't know if the spring called Thisbe even exists now. Earthquakes and the rise and fall of civilizations clogging the capillaries of this magma ball have changed so much in so short a time. Your names have shifted again, with few Juliets and even fewer Romeos leaving their traces, except in movies.

And when you wake, you will have an interesting dream to tell.

All because I was bored of sheep.