The terror

I feel the terror follow me wherever I go. The terror is shaped like my mother, aged twenty-nine. Her long hair is the color of hot, oily espresso, of dark deer hides, of tan desert landscapes. On an alien planet, there are sunsets cast in the same shattered amber as her eyes. I turn around and catch a flash of her unsmiling expression. There’s a trail of freckles across her nose—a feature she had lost by the time she became my mother.

The terror tracks me down the street, into the train station and then onto the rapid express. Suburban Tokyo speeds by in a parade of squat, cement-block apartment buildings and forlorn pine trees. The sky is a patch of cloudy blue that appears only occasionally, crisscrossed in telephone wires. I can smell the artificial scent of her shampoo. Something sweet, frothy, approximately tropical. I count the seconds behind each breath—three in, three out—and try my hardest not to retch.

She follows me into a labyrinth made of tall garden hedges. At the labyrinth’s center, inside a pavilion of wood, the terror takes on a different shape. We cross swords under a red sky. I say everything I need to say. I hold nothing back.

When I react in anger, I feel the terror. It’s a wave that the ocean of my memory will always remember. When I break a boundary, I feel the terror. It’s a pit with no bottom. Soupy darkness that coolly eliminates every sensation. No, it does more than eliminate sensation—it erases my defining traits, like acid. It renders me less of an identifiable person, the way wind and time corrode a body into a corpse. In the presence of the terror, I can feel myself actively decompose.

I read my writing and see the terror everywhere. I see myself trying to reason with it, and, when that inevitably fails, I see myself plead with it. All the strength in me can keep it at bay only a little while. Pinpricks of blood dotting the margins. There’s so much anguish in my diaries I shock even myself.

But I feel the terror most acutely when I have no desire to write at all. It’s not that the terror takes away the desire. It’s that it knows how to get me to reject the desire, so that even writing brings no relief. Clothed in cheap chain-link armor, I feel the terror approach, an ochre sun at its back, with its strongest weapon. My mind trembles in total panic until even the panic subsides, and then I am left with nothing. My soldier’s shield lies in pieces in the pavilion. The terror takes the only way I have to express myself and casually, with no trace of violence, snaps it in half.

Petalismos

Her head aches behind her cheekbones, as though her mind were a ball of fire lassoed by cords of skin. She does her best approximation of a gentle smile as her work colleague explains his frustrations with a client. We both have so much more to offer, she thinks, but you’re a work friend and not a friend friend, so I can’t tell you that. We spend minor eternities here, together, entombed in synthetic ferns, dusty glass, and printer paper. We should be honest about our experiences. But there’s a vast and indispensable firewall in place when we interact. I see its flickering aquamarine flames when I lift my eyes from my laptop screen. A warning. We couldn’t be close, she thinks, and still do this job.

A dove with red eyes occasionally travels between them. Beneath its wings, out-of-office, vulnerability is admissible. “I don’t often tell someone the truth,” he says to her, on a Wednesday during lunch. She is ripping up a paper napkin—slowly, methodically, as though stripping the flesh off a bone—in her lap as she listens to him talk about his life outside of work. Beyond the eight to twelve hours that he spends clicking around the vapid and crushing universe of a PowerPoint, he has dreams, desires, many variants of darkness that bide their time before rapidly multiplying and, occasionally, overcoming his defenses.

They talk “purpose.” They talk “meaning.” Two notions as intrinsic to modern life as breath and heartbeat. They’ve had to exile both from their minds in order to take an office job and not die of cognitive dissonance. To discuss them now fills her with raw, divine emotion.

“I’m a negative utilitarian,” she says, somewhat loftily, somewhat intoxicated by the feeling of talking so freely. “I am focused on minimizing suffering and maximizing joy in the people around me. That’s all the purpose I need.”

For almost a minute, he says nothing. He looks up at the ceiling and then back at her. The dark brown of his eyes glimmers with something that is almost tears, the way the sound of a single guitar string is almost mournful. “Don’t you wish for something bigger than just that?” he says, finally. “What are you doing with your one life?”

It’s a gamble of a cliché, but it connects. Twenty-nine in 2023, and she holds her fifty remaining years of consciousness in her lap and, distractedly, thoughtlessly, is shredding them, one by one. Blood on her fingers. Petals in the soil. Something swells. A boom of noise. Flesh beneath a blister. Water approaching the shore. It surges onto the look on her face, and she finds she can no longer pretend.

Like if you cry every time

What is a post on social media? Five liters of blood, poured out onto a metal baking tray, where it congeals into cubes of quivering jelly before being flipped out onto the cool chrome surface of the operating table. Snapping on seafoam-green gloves, a surgeon prods each glistening cube with the business end of a scalpel, bursting the delicate tension between outer layer and liquid innards. Emotions splash out and blood, contorting on the table, begins to perform a macabre dance. It thins and thickens, forming a plaintive message in lowercase letters. Beads of punctuation drip down in unctuous red streaks.

Growing up online is like being dissected under a microscope, flooded with headlights, trapped behind glass, and then chucked out, in parts, into a roaring crowd. Intense fixation, explosive speculation, deranged invasion, and then total abandonment. A culture that entices by claiming to celebrate honesty, but that relishes in punishing vulnerability, often brutally. A culture that has no idea what it means by authenticity, sincerity, or love. A beast with a million freely-moving hands can justify any behavior.

“Digital hygiene.” I think I now finally understand the term. The Internet makes me feel dirty in the most literal sense. I know I’ve spent too much time online when my mind feels like a scrap of fabric dragged through a pool of mud. I recover it and twist it tightly between my hands to wring out the sludge; blood spurts out instead, in a gory pink fountain. My spirit lags. My desire to do anything vanishes. My attention span shrivels to nothing. My drive to create scrabbles up my body and screams in my face to do SOMETHING, do ANYTHING. Meanwhile, a hand that resembles mine clicks through a bloody trail of posts, and eyes that resemble mine glaze over.

When I’ve exhausted the content on one site, the hand and eyes migrate compulsively over to another; the process repeats itself, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. In a frictionless, vapid, procedurally generated landscape of filtered light, rounded fonts, and focus-grouped clipart, social media appears normal, predictable, safe. A wave of constant sensation. But when I witness how the wave reacts to a jagged edge, I am jolted out of the placid dream. We wanted community. We wanted a cure. Let’s not pretend that the Internet is capable of providing either in any consistent way. The codes through which we speak to one another are completely corrupted. The conflict has taken on the mask of a divine war, one in which mercy is not only impossible to mete out, but met with disgust.

You may be thinking to yourself: “What is she talking about? Is she talking about cancel culture, call-out culture, culture in general, or some other thing?” The answer to that is: No. I am not talking about any of those things. I don’t lay claim to a thesis here. I don’t even lay claim to coherence. This isn’t a thinkpiece. I just want to say that, every time I find myself on social media, I feel more and more that no molecule ever traveled the length of spacetime to live the life of your average stranger online. The Internet is not the worst place in the world. But nowhere else do I feel the contradiction between human compassion and human cruelty more acutely. A pit filled with the bodies of nephilim and their congealing blood, and I sit on the edge of that pit, legs dangling over the red-black hole, watching, and trying not to watch.

Ghosts

This is the last post I will write about Gideon, because I have the feeling that he is fading—not out of life in general, but out of my life, specifically. A tremulous line of salt on the craggy blue rocks, dissolving as the water comes in. The last triumphant note of a hundred-member orchestra, evaporating into the air of a bronze chamber. Tears cling to my face—tears neither of suffering nor joy, but some third thing that unbolts like a chest in an attic.

Time is a forest and Gideon and I briefly walked one of its branching paths together. I recall emerging, blurry-eyed, from a far-off den, and seeing him across a field of purple heather, through the thorns. We were brought together by the similarities in life experience, the proximity in our ages, and the coincidence of our encounter at the crossroads. Though we had little in common, initially, beyond the circumstantial, we both possessed a dark streak that we felt set us apart, and that made us distrustful of anything dew-sweetened in the gardens of our pasts—those potions, clouds, and roses. We suspected already that knowledge—sometimes an antidote, sometimes a poison—would trickle back through the forest, settling in those gardens like an oil spill, revealing the potion to be syrup, the clouds, smoke. The roses, fanged and carnivorous.

In a coffee shop on a main road, we compared notes. We traded vulnerabilities, and didn’t. We learned, and didn’t. On a frozen street in midwinter, we tried to console each other. We tried to make the moment more than it was. I held Gideon’s two gloved hands in both of mine and promised we’d keep in touch, though I understood that we would not. My breath was a plume of pewter-colored smoke. His face contorted with pain, but I was privately embarrassed by the hugeness of his feelings. Another part of me, secreted within the depths of my ego, was crushed, too, because I knew his tears were not shed on my behalf, but because of his fear of the upcoming end to our age of innocence.

Ah, I’m not writing about Gideon anymore, am I? Not the Gideon that I know now, in any case. Not tall, dark-eyed and depressed Gideon with the painstakingly gelled hair and the perfectly tailored suit. It may be that in each stage of my life I meet a Gideon—someone who shares my propensity for cynicism, my terror— and we move each other, like twin red stars locked in an inescapable orbit, but without ever coming close to telling each other the truth.

Now, crawling through the dark moss, I raise my eyes and see Gideon. He is hidden in the dense canopy, one eye of blood-streaked amber visible through a shroud of gold-edged leaves. I blink and he vanishes. My breath is a bruised fist in my chest as I wade through a stream of chilly, translucent blue. The water doesn’t rid me of the thorns, but it lessens their sting. On the other side, I find soft hollows left by footsteps, where spores of something unknown and scintillating have taken root.

The best they could, but badly

Often I wish that I had natural singing talent, because I think the chalky, malodorous melancholia which I am prone to writing would be more palatable in the form of lyrics.

When I hear that my last grandparent has died, news that arrives to me thirdhand, I feel a single note rise out of my body. It bubbles out of the skin of my chest and bursts in the air. The note is limp, subdued, like the mewl of a dying hare, its pink-ringed eyes caught between the gasp of curved fangs. After the puncture of realization, the moment evaporates into a glimmer of amethyst and then dust. Gone with no ceremony of feeling, no heraldry of sentiment. I’ve spent years wondering what this knowledge would feel like and now I have final confirmation of what I’ve long suspected: the death can happen long before the death happens. You mourn the death before you know you are mourning the death. Blood is merely blood.

Shattering the surface of the frozen pool, memories float up in crates that I slash open, one by one. A vintage perfume bottle with a crystalline stopper. Snow-white ringlets, permed to surreal perfection. The greenish coolness of a tiled room in the afternoon, all the shades drawn. The periodic table, a multi-colored rectangle shaped like a fortress, which she knew by heart. Ocean waves, lapis in the sun. Everything but the face. I wade in to rescue these things for my small kingdom, knee-deep and shivering from the cold, as vultures circle the pool.

Olympias Prana: A Biography (II)

Chapter VI: Betrayal of the lamb

Andie Lamb was born Assumpta II, the scion of a prominent exo-colony dynasty. Her grandmother, Assumpta I, had successfully negotiated the purchase of the Moon’s entire supply of platinum, which Andie’s mother, Assumpta II, expanded to also include manganese. Andie was raised on Earth, though she was expected, on a yearly basis, to make a pilgrimage to her grandmother’s gravesite, in the Sea of Serenity. She would have been familiar, therefore, with all the pleasures and terrors of space travel and habituation; she and Olympias had this, and other experiences, including the guardianship of troubled mothers, in common. In contrast to Olympias, however, Andie grew up with the expectations of a child of destiny. As the heir to the Lamb fortune, that she was predestined to one day govern the better half of the Moon’s resources and supervise their extraction, a fate for which Andie was prepared with the unfailing exactitude and fanatical diligence of a pious prince. But destiny had other goals in mind by 2251, when a once-formidable dynasty crumbled into the sea and its last daughter found herself buried in the darkness of civilization’s near-total collapse.

Olympias and Andie Lamb met at an indeterminate point halfway through the Black Decade, in what may be the most famous chance encounter in history. Andie and a man—his name has been lost to history, or perhaps purposefully obscured—had been sheltering in an abandoned meat-packing factory following the collapse of their bunker. After an acrimonious dispute, the man locked Assumpta III in a meat locker, presumably with the goal of suffocating her. Olympias had been on a foraging expedition at the time—one of her first aboveground—when, as if by divine intervention, she came across him in flagrante, in the very act of shoving the metal door to the locker closed, its rubber seal squelching, abruptly silencing Andie’s panicked screams. Olympias, ever quick to act and acutely sensitive to such injustice, wasted no time in gutting him with her quantum knife. Given the bloody circumstances of this meeting and the depth of their subsequent relationship, the relationship between Olympias and Andie has been variously described as “pure loyalty of a knight to a monarch,” “religious devotion akin to priest and follower,” and, by Baby Blood, the most reliable chronicler of the time, as “as ironclad as the bond between master and dog”. He might have chosen a different comparison had he been aware of what was to come.

(Caption below accompanying photograph of Brave Olympias Rescues, circa 2500). The same unknown painter who captured Olympias’s mental anguish in Brave Olympias Resists resurrected her once more in Brave Olympias Rescues: rendered again in vibrant oils, Olympias is at the height of heroism here, clothed in a black neoprene bodysuit, holding a taciturn man at knifepoint while Andie, wailing and maiden-like in a shredded white dress, clings to her leg. Though the painter doubtlessly added extra detail for dramatic effect, the gist is largely faithfully preserved.

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The Red Pool

I stop in the middle of the crosswalk because I want to write about this scene later. I linger for as long as I can, eyes scanning the sky, the ground, the trees. Time is a tyrannical taskmaster, but not incapable of warmth, not incapable of largesse. Today, it shows its capacity for generosity by slowing the movement of the cars cresting the hills that lead to this road, rewarding my devotion with a handful of extra seconds to absorb the setting.

I try to read the day like a poem—which means I nurture the expectation of finding, at the day’s end, a measure of grace. I expect the pleasure of discovery, the joy of meaning. The sensations are all here—the richness of daylight, the tenderness of the breeze, the impossibility of the sky—but the words to fully describe them haven’t yet completed their pilgrimage from a distant, rock-cut cave-by-the-sea into my waiting arms. Standing in the crosswalk, I try to ease their journey here by turning down the static of my mind. I quiet the persistently critical voice that is trying, not entirely successfully, to be helpful. I close the saddest pages of my diary. I turn my eyes, instead, to the runes that are inlaid in the sky in the manner of gemstones spanning a crown. Following forty-eight hours of gray humidity and drowsy rain, bright, puffy clouds have reemerged across the firmament, in huge and cliff-like incarnations. A mountain range of baby blue, each peak gilded in fantastical light. They are saying something to me that I’ll spend my whole life trying to understand.

Writing is scrying with a red pool contained in a rocky, barnacle-crusted bowl. Writing is digging up gnarled roots and inspecting their calloused rinds, tracing the greenish veins that jut out and transform into the pulpy legs of reedy stems and then metamorphosize again into the many gold-ochre eyes of a field of daisies, encountering, in this way, the passage of life from infancy to flowering, and thinking that, though human life has no such parallel, no such clarity in purpose and form, writing is finding that passage. Writing is feeling your way through the tunnel. Writing is flying through the canyon. Writing is feeling empty, then full, then empty, again. Collecting every huge feeling and experiencing it anew—every shred of painful, tedious feeling—but with hope, this time, not because these things could change, but because they won’t, and the wound they leave behind, while so distressing I will stumble and fall, can always be taken to the red pool in the middle of a crosswalk on a stunningly bright day and be lowered into the cooling waters where, if the wound cannot be repaired, then it will, at least, be consoled, soothed, cherished, pacified, and I’ll emerge, if not strong, then strong enough to rise and stagger forward.

Hypercritical

(A successor of sorts to: Hypervigilant)

On location, huddled behind a huge and craggy boulder with the wind howling at me to get OUT, I hurriedly sweep the few things scattered around me into a bag, with the exception of a dirt-stained spiral notebook and a cheap ballpoint pen, which I clutch to my chest as though they were treasured relics. My hand seeks the pen with the certainty of a bird charting its course toward home. Fingers crimped around it, I think of the events unfolding around me and, brow furrowed, eyes closed, I put them down on paper. Writing it down is an act of profound intimacy between myself and her, but I try to stay distant. I am cool-headed as I try to relate, to explain, to analyze. But it’s hard, in the middle of reliving a memory, to unglue these two minds of mine. I am caught in the sticky, hazy, jewel-toned marrow between the past and the present. Even as an observer, my emotions participate; they balloon out from my body, even as I restrict myself, physically, to a strict perimeter around the boulder.

In the past, unfolding right before me, she staggers through the desert, hands crudely bound. Sand swirls around her feet and fills her field of vision with rays of rough and chalky bronze. The wind picks up, abruptly, cruelly; it yanks her off her feet and sends her tumbling forward. In the present, stealing glances at her fallen form from behind the boulder, I am clear-eyed. I don’t hear her cries. I don’t step out to rescue her. Instead, I crouch back down to record what’s happening in the fairest possible language. In describing the events, I strike the exact right balance between understanding and condemnation.

She gets back up; she tries, bravely, to resist the desires of the indifferent wind. When she collapses again on the dunes, face and hands rubbed raw, her breath coming in shallow, harsh gasps, her skin purpling under the dusty apricot and gold of the sunset, I don’t interfere. I watch from behind the security of the boulder, my fingers digging into its crevices. Everything will continue on. I can’t change what happened here.

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Galatea, Associate Manager

I rub my face with the flat of my hand. Behind my eyes, a fractured kaleidoscope slowly rotates, releasing small shards of multicolored glass that fall onto my lap, radiating light in the dimness of my bedroom. I brush them away. On weekday mornings, I can’t wallow in what I’d rather be doing with my time. For now, all that matters is the eighty-slide deck in front of me: a leviathan of cruelly misaligned bullet points and unruly fonts over which that I have been agonizing for nine weeks. What did people in this industry even do before the advent of PowerPoint?

I am painstakingly shifting a cursor left and right, a million micromovements involving one calloused fingertip against the chrome mousepad. No crusader has ever felt a stronger commitment to the divinity of struggle than I at this moment. PowerPoint leers at me, its red-orange icons twisting in the periphery of my vision. Its torments are numerous and varied. I have spent the last hour of my finite life changing the typeface of select words from normal to bold, obsessing over my selections, begging God for the guidance of infinite wisdom, and then reverting the changes in a fit of pique.

Professional work, a career, a “sector,” a CV like a beaded string, in which each glass bauble represents a new attempt to configure an adult identity, to carve out, from the mottled clay of endless days, the shining form of perfect purpose. When I explain what I do to new acquaintances, I use words like “liaise,” “craft,” and “grow,” stirring these terms into conversations in a lofty tone, generally striving to cultivate the impression that I am a conjuror communing with the deep from within the darkness of a cubicle. In actuality, I spend most of my time neck-deep in the minor intricacies of a slide deck, every wrinkle in my satin blouse illuminated under pitiless white bulbs, while pretending not to notice the tensions flaring around the water cooler as two suited sixty-year-olds, each drawing from a seemingly infinite well of moss-covered grievances, circle each other with toothy grins and vacant eyes, like wary, tail-thumping predators returning for a final showdown on the savanna.

Free from Pygmalion and in search of pure freedom, Galatea steps off her pearly bed and boards the commuter train. She drowns out the sounds of rattling wheels by way of chrome-coated, teardrop-shaped earbuds. Brushing her hair out of her face, she casts her gaze around the subway car and lands on me, a figure clumsily pressed against the door, the strap of my bag digging into my shoulder. She meets my eyes and fixes me with a disdainful look. She can see the churning seas within me and finds my lack of courage, as I sit in my canoe rattled by waves, unable to seize the oar, contemptible. I shrug. I understand her disdain. I even share it. But some of us have relinquished the need to find work meaningful, though we still light a candle, in the dead of night, for our former, and now long-lost, fantasy of the future. That fantasy is a crystalline vision that splintered away to flower in a different universe, leaving behind only a few shards embedded in the mind. But Galatea doesn’t care about the mourning I’ve already done, and the closure I think I feel. She only sees the outcome, and she despairs.

At the office, I glue myself to the PowerPoint with all the joyless energy of a black hole. I click idly, squashing each imaginative, unproductive thought that stirs from the muck of my mind-at-work with methodical, emotionless totality, as though vacuuming up a frothy, bronze-colored galaxy. The dusty glow of the stars, seized in a fist of spacetime, twists, warps, and then vanishes. The light at the back of my brain dims and goes out. Nothing is left in the small, tender place where my dreams used to live. But the best (worst?) thing about dreams is their infinite powers of resurrection. The kaleidoscope doesn’t stop turning. Galatea doesn’t give up. Tomorrow morning, I will wake and, hand groping for my phone lodged somewhere in the sheets, my mind will bump into the revived fantasy in all its cosmic, catastrophic lust for life. Galatea will meet my eyes again on the train and smile, this time, with new faith in my ability to be a vessel for true purpose. “Quit your job,” she’ll mouth at me. “Do anything else.” The sun will flash through the windows as I turn away, heart aflame.

Contrapasso of the butterfly

With a disconcertingly cheerful chime, my phone announces the arrival of a text from Gideon. I shift my attention over to the rectangle of light, underneath the bed covers, that glows like a predatory fish at 20,000 feet. The text is encased in a chest of forest green that appears as soon as I pick up the phone; I open it with a press of the thumb and absorb, rather than read, its message. Its few lines catapult off the screen and fall over me in a dark wave. The words are disfigured, somehow and, in reading, they disfigure me. Gideon has had a panic attack.

It’s not a good time for feelings. At present, I am in the wallowing in the damp, chilly swamp between the moody pool of sleep and the acrid desert of wakefulness. I am refusing to enter the labyrinth of the rest of day which will involve: coffee, news, coffee, e-mail, e-mail, e-mail, coffee, self-loathing break, PowerPoint, e-mail, e-mail. Possibly I have understated the prevalence of email in that list. If I have time for Gideon, it is only in the splinters between one task and another, when my attention will falter and catch on the thorn of my recollection of his message, and I will think of him pacing his bedroom, or forcing himself to eat lunch, or scrolling aimlessly through Instagram, or lying on the couch with his face pressed wetly to the dusty cushions.

His trust in me terrifies me. He’s told me about his panic attack, apparently without any thought to what I could do with the information. In the past, I might have felt perverse pleasure at receiving such personal revelations. A missive handwritten in blood and addressed to me is proof of my success as an advisor, a confidant, a companion. It’s proof of power—power to plunge my hand through a mask of flesh and expression and extract the broken shards of a confession, a secret, a promise. To be trusted with vulnerability is to be well-regarded, respected, cherished as a friend. But reading the text from Gideon now feels like being handed a nail bomb. Its jagged edges pierce the palm of my hand. It escapes my grasp and pinballs relentlessly around the bare corridors of my mind. Its power is obvious and frightening.

He’s had scary thoughts, he says. He’s sought out professional assistance, and it hasn’t helped. I am not surprised, though I am still disheartened. “I am working on it in therapy” is a sentence I cannot parse, even though the phrase is deployed so casually now it’s easy to accept it axiomatically, as a basic truth of our modern world. I think of a therapist as the Virgil to a patient’s Dante; they may record, console, reassure, even guide and reframe, but they cannot change the fundamental principles of the underworld. A guided and annotated voyage through Hell is not a useless exercise, but it is also not useful in the way Gideon, self-aware and self-hating to the end, needs. But then again, what do I know about what he needs? I am still searching for the sequence of words that would unlock his peace of mind, though I know, from the cruelty of experience, that I have never possessed the ability to summon the angel, to hasten the healing, to produce the cure. Each attempt only manages to cause more harm.

I wish I could tell Gideon this: I don’t ever feel life is worth living, either. But it doesn’t matter, because that’s the wrong question. I don’t look at a black and yellow butterfly, shredded on the concrete outside my front door, and wonder if its life was worth it. A butterfly leads a life lacking in fate, purpose, or worth. It flies past the archangel Gabriel and doesn’t recognize him. Its life and ours are different but fundamentally the same, in the way all shapes of the weather emanate from basic properties of the sky. Does that help you to feel less unworthy—the notion itself that “worth” itself it not worthy of consideration?

I know it doesn’t. I know it strikes you as a flimsy, indulgent rhetorical exercise. A cheap square of plywood when what you need is a bridge of solid oak to cross a black gulf. We stand there, together, at its opening, where the dry earth forms a trembling lip that threatens to crumble and then cascade down into nothing. We stare down. We belong to that darkness below but it does not think of us anymore than the ocean thinks of the fish that belong to it. We hold our lives—yours, mine, and the butterfly’s—in the form of palmfuls of red sand, held tightly in the undecorated chalices of our hands. I am trying to convince both you and me to tip the red sand back into the vials in our pockets and experience what we can in this wasteland of occasional beauty. I am trying to summon the courage to touch your arm. To be a comfort to you when I cannot be a comfort to myself. In the end, we will be lost to the mouth of the wind, and whatever dust we leave behind will never tell the complete story.