It had been time too long to forget; but not time enough to forget death. She stood, if standing were her virtue, upon the brink of the same she had forevermore, and foreverless. It was her home.
Her heart spoke to her, in tears.
“Where have we run?” It cried. Not the hopeless, dramatic, heaving sobs of a being possessed by an emotion – she was too large for that. It was the weariness of one who has never learned to forget and has only just remembered his folly; made all the worse by the fact that he can no longer learn this.
“We have,” Irrelevant responded. Her voice would have been described as quiet by an onlooker, but this description is completely useless as this would be like observing a mole conversing with its death – unfathomable and inscrutable. “It is not our duty to fall. It has been made impossible for us, and I cannot apologize for this. I cannot even admit that I would like to.”
Her soul sighed. Her soul was an old man, slender and tall; a formidable figure even in his age. Her heart was smaller, but somehow... more vast. She enveloped her soul, or aired him.
“Surely you do not hold this in any regard to which I am beholden,” it sniffed. There was nothing special about the sniff, it was just a sniff. “Before this conference you had decided to abide by this tenet: the unending conference itself. This wouldn’t see but the tail of this tale, ail? Neither.”
Irrelevant could not hear. She wouldn’t, she had closed the door of her mind. They stood as massive, almost leering towers of wood which could be moved by the slightest twitch of the thumb; if such was the device through which one desired to persist. A scrupulous derivation of naught, of course; but she wasn’t to know that.
“Who has known the most pain?” she asked of the eye.
“He who has born it before any other,” it replied, without thinking.
“Who has seen it through to the end?”
“None. But if you were to ask of its origin… of this I could inform you.”
“Who is left to remember? What mind remains great enough to house this word?”
“Its origin is confounded by visions of resurgence; not hedonism.”
[7/26/2024]