They make an unlikely pair-- white and black, old and young, scarred and golden. Each a universe of thoughts, aligning if only for the fraction of a second and then whirling away once again, restless and cosmic.
The younger says: "Nowhere, I suppose."
The elder says: "Oh?"
You see, Eik was from nowhere, too.
He hardly remembers what his nowhere was like. The memories are grease-slick and uncertain with sudden, short-lived streaks of clarity. Like trying to look through a window but the curtain, the curtain is rising and falling and distorting the picture of the nowhere that lies beyond. Sometimes he sits at the window and he stares out across the landscape of his memory. He stares and stares until he is not sure anymore what is memory unfiltered, what is true, and what has taken the shape of the tattered white curtain.
Most days it doesn't matter (always, it does not matter) but some days memory is all he has. Some days when he has not spoken for so long that his mouth feels like sand, and the dunes are full of mirage, and he feels nothing but untethered, some days he would lose himself entirely if it were not for that window. Those glimpses of grey taiga and black beaches and his mother's soft-certain eyes (she was too sweet for that ashen nowhere), trees foreign to Novus, friends and families long turned to ash. Those glimpses were the only thing he had which could not be taken from him, and although they were a terrible weakness they were also, in their cobbled way, much like the rest of him, a strength.
But Eik had come here by land and not by sea. This he knows although the mechanisms escape him-- for is Novus not an island, surrounded by water on all sides?
"If you tell me a tale from your homeland," he licks his lips and they taste like sand, "I will tell you one from mine." It is an odd proposition for the grey, although Erasmus could not know that. Eik was no natural storyteller, no natural speaker at all, even after his tenure as Emissary. But nowhere appealed to him sharply. The places we're from, the places we're going-- they're all nowhere, we're all no one, everything is nothing. There was some truth to be found, on the other side of everything. And the moon shines on, laughing and loving and indifferent all at once.
E I K
grief can be a kind of music
that knows how to rise like the sea
The younger says: "Nowhere, I suppose."
The elder says: "Oh?"
You see, Eik was from nowhere, too.
He hardly remembers what his nowhere was like. The memories are grease-slick and uncertain with sudden, short-lived streaks of clarity. Like trying to look through a window but the curtain, the curtain is rising and falling and distorting the picture of the nowhere that lies beyond. Sometimes he sits at the window and he stares out across the landscape of his memory. He stares and stares until he is not sure anymore what is memory unfiltered, what is true, and what has taken the shape of the tattered white curtain.
Most days it doesn't matter (always, it does not matter) but some days memory is all he has. Some days when he has not spoken for so long that his mouth feels like sand, and the dunes are full of mirage, and he feels nothing but untethered, some days he would lose himself entirely if it were not for that window. Those glimpses of grey taiga and black beaches and his mother's soft-certain eyes (she was too sweet for that ashen nowhere), trees foreign to Novus, friends and families long turned to ash. Those glimpses were the only thing he had which could not be taken from him, and although they were a terrible weakness they were also, in their cobbled way, much like the rest of him, a strength.
But Eik had come here by land and not by sea. This he knows although the mechanisms escape him-- for is Novus not an island, surrounded by water on all sides?
"If you tell me a tale from your homeland," he licks his lips and they taste like sand, "I will tell you one from mine." It is an odd proposition for the grey, although Erasmus could not know that. Eik was no natural storyteller, no natural speaker at all, even after his tenure as Emissary. But nowhere appealed to him sharply. The places we're from, the places we're going-- they're all nowhere, we're all no one, everything is nothing. There was some truth to be found, on the other side of everything. And the moon shines on, laughing and loving and indifferent all at once.
grief can be a kind of music
that knows how to rise like the sea
@Erasmus
Wind from the Sea by Andrew Wyeth
Time makes fools of us all
