She stood overlooking a deeply wooded park that sank below her like a bowl, its curves welcoming the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon.
She remembered reading once of an evening that climbed the walls like ink filling a jar. At the time, the image had lingered for the tidal thick darkness it conjured. She had been captivated by the notion of ink moving to claim the words and actions and memories of the day, obliterating them in a spilled wash of covering erasure. Every day a new day; every dawn a brand new page upon which to write the story.
Every day meaningless in the end.
Written upon and then overwritten by darkness absolute.
A page turned, a crisp white nothingness awaiting the details of another lighttime passage.
Not entirely untouched, however.
One could, if one was inclined to spend the day thusly, take a handful of accumulated grime from the living of this day and rub it carefully over the day’s page. Hidden within the page were the faint impressions pushed through from the pressed recording of all the days that had gone before. A million etchings of a million gravestones for a million days, all stacked atop one another on this day’s page. One might spend a day or a million days gazing into what went before, separating out the carved notations of death, running one’s fingers over their faint braille impressions. There . . . the oaken raked leaves that smoked and crimsoned as her father set them ablaze with one angrily struck match after another. There . . . the apologied scent of lemon cake wafting from the kitchen as she curled small beneath the back-porch steps and tried to drift herself apart. There . . . the shimmered pride of a gold star atop a math assignment as she folded the page and sailed and sank it along the water’s edge. There . . . the tentative hopeful dance of fingertips against her uncurled palm as she walked beside and apart. There . . . the swollen held breath finally released and poured against the too-close swaying walls of a room the shade of lilac-grayed bruise. There . . . the blotted rorschach of her own blood splashed against the white tiled floor in which she saw everything and then turned away from the foretelling.
The connections among the notations of each day’s death were apparent only to her.
To explain would take this day, and she was the only one to whom the explanations mattered.
So she tried not to look backward at the wisps and hints and impressions of the agos. She tried to resist the impulse to reach for what she knew had been. She tried not to use the days that were left explicating invisible threads that strung invisible jewels that made invisible sense of her life to only her.
Because at the end of the day, the wash of nighttime’s ink spread its obliterating message and this day was lost to futility.
Lost to futility.
Was there a sadder headstone?
She stood overlooking the park as the shadows continued to lengthen. Blackness spilled and stretched and sloshed along the bottom of the bowl, swirling up along its sides. Evening’s ink poured out its covering erasure and claimed the markings of the day.
There was enough light left in which to navigate and find her way.
She descended into the inky depths.
Her footsteps invisible.
Lost to futility.
Again.
