Existence

Part Eight

I cannot feel the sun at my back, but somehow I know the storm has passed and that I, however inconceivably, have made it out alive.

I am submerged beneath nearly a foot of smooth, silty beige, and I cannot move easily. My joints are irritated, and every part of me creaks like a machine that has never seen the business end of an oil can. I start with my fingers, aching as they are, and slowly worm my way out of this hole, feeling the outside for the first time, feeling the sand fall through the cracks of my hands.

Oh, I would write about it now, if only I wasn't struggling for breath beneath the weight of the desert.

Once my arms are liberated, I drag myself away from the pit, my legs still not fully able to respond to my commands. I flip onto my backside and look around, but see nothing. Good. It means Mare will never be able to find me. After all, not even I know where I am now.

∞

I have little way to measure time accurately besides lunar cycles now, but I never read much about those in all my boundless research. In fact, my endless reading and learning seems so far from endless now. It's still a struggle to survive, just as much as it was in those early, forgotten days, before I came across Mare or she came across me.

I had nearly starved to death in the desert when I saw the first tuft of life packed tightly between hundreds of miles of desert on both sides. I wept tears of pure joy as I felt its prickly fibres sting my hands, and though I would have given my left arm to eat it only a few minutes before, in that moment, I was unable to uproot and eat it. I left the plant where it was and continued walking across the death-encrusted plains.

Where there's life, there must be water and it was water for which I was searching. The occasional shrub or cactus began pointing the way, a map of flora placed in some divine notion to guide me to my home. The drawings had been useless, but the life never was.

The bushes eventually became trees, and sand gave way to grass. I almost spent the entire first day I saw it feeling the purple strands between my toes and laying on my belly to smell each and every blade. That night, I stretched my arms and legs through the clumps, savouring every glorious patch of nature before falling asleep beneath the beaming stars. I cannot remember ever sleeping so soundly, and I doubt that I ever will again.

After that it was only half a day to the river, and I've been following it down ever since. This morning I caught a fish for breakfast, not with my hands as I used to in the old days, but with a net of the plastic wrap I had used to distil water in the desert. The taste was purer and richer than any food that had ever passed my lips, and I didn't even need to cook it in a lemon garlic sauce.

I heard a sound yesterday, a muffled yelp and then a crunch. It might have been man hunting, squeezing his prey's neck with the raw power of brute strength. I will need to investigate. I feel I am closer. I feel I am nearly there.

∞

I recognize this riverbank. That much is entirely obvious to me. I can look down and see ever so clearly my impression in the grasses, trying to scoop up the wary fishes, just waiting for one to wander reluctantly into my palm.

I walk along a little further, into a narrower part of the river where the bank has been overgrown with trees to provide the fishermen and women with shade. I don't remember this exactly, but I suppose they could have grown while I was gone. It was a while, after all, a very long while.

I hear her first, only a slight swishing of the water, as if someone's dipped their fingers in just for a little taste, to test the warmth before diving in. I look in the sound's direction and there she is, the first of my kind I have seen since leaving so long ago. I want to scream with childish joy, but I know I'd just scare her away. I take out my pad of paper and choose to observe quietly, scratching my findings unseen in the shadows.