The Great Serrated Batholith
A voyage through desolation.
Tumanguya I bow to you.
Let me tell you of the awareness your scoured landscapes lay bare for me.
The world is not as stable as it once was. The foundations have been shown to be worse than crumbling. They are porous with an ancient rot; the fact that they never existed. The space, the thing, we inhabit is a solitary maze of mirrors, and there have never been any walls. As we stare, mute, into the widening, rocky expanse, we see further into our own souls.
When the soul and the body are made for different purposes, the result is disintegration. The barren landscape no longer exists in a vacuum. It is a literal representation of all that remains. I have no sense of self within which to shelter because there was no key to this puzzle. No one missing piece. Rather, this a collection of several incomplete puzzles jumbled together. Each piece stolen from some other, now impossible to complete puzzle. There is no solution. Anything that fits is only an illusion. A chance connection. Was this collection made in error? How could life have failed itself so badly? Organisms are a happenstance mess of partnerships, but nobody told my pile of parts it was meant to function as a whole.
Bereft of wholeness. Forced to believe in a thin veneer of identity, hoping a way forward can be forged. The smoothness of the road belies the uneven inner void. It can only be shaky, sickening going.
I wonder about each side road. Too small to map. But I remember them all. Missed opportunities and foolish mistakes. Perhaps this is the title of my life. Wandering past life’s open doors and enthusiastically smashing myself face first into firmly closed sliding glass as a way of being. Why is my face so deformed? It lacks the silent strength of your own. Solid. Exposed to the world for millennia. Immovable. Not me. I’ve been using mine to experience rejection, lost chances, and dead ends. Any day I come home without a fresh smear of blood across shredded lips I should rejoice. Instead, I just wonder when the other shoe is going to drop. Surely, all the missed curses of this day must accumulate somewhere.
Old one, I’m not trying to interest you in me. I’m trying to interest you in your own experience. Remember your life. Young and molten. An age spent rising through gentle earth. Trace your mind over the rough edges of your memories before they vanish into realms without dimension.
About the Creator
Stéphane Dreyfus
Melanchoholic.
It’s just me. Growing old and wrong. A time lapse bonsai soul, clipped and curtailed in all the worst ways.
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More stories from Stéphane Dreyfus and writers in Poets and other communities.
Unavoidable Trouble
Brutal. Several other skiers have used this term, unprompted, to describe the weather on the front side of the mountain today. During the long ride up the lift, when I pass over a great void, suspended high between two distant lift towers, the snow comes in at a hard angle. Despite the silence there is a force to it. A howl hides at the edge of those fast moving flakes. A shout hidden in the moments before it is voiced. There is an unrelenting unfairness to it. I, a drop of warmth, barely shielded, high above a frozen Earth, pulled at a constant pace towards the end. I am heading away from the calm. The snowfall increases. I am only aware of my skis due to their weight. What is that inner voice that says jump. Lift the bar and fall into the white. Let us compare, on the rocks below, our fragile wetness to that of a snowflake. Who’s voice is this? There is no sadness to it. Only curiosity. Should we not add red to the white? A shudder. The destination approaches. I feel it before I can see anything. I must disembark into the blinding storm. Brutal.
By Stéphane Dreyfus4 months ago in Poets
Silence
I don’t remember the day the world ended. But I do remember the day I noticed. That photo was it, but I did not know what it meant until I sat in my darkened bathroom, staring at the newly developed film. The street was neither empty, nor abandoned. It was dead. The colours of the flowers wrapped in that red ribbon caught my eye, and as I crouched to take that photo, I could hear only the lonely silence of a graveyard after dark.
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Comments (1)
Stéphane Dreyfus, you have done a disturbing and incredibly affecting job exploring existential sadness and the transient essence of existence via the prism of the natural world.