If

If we're walking together, hand in hand, and you run or are torn away or disappear; if I am alone in the woods, and lost, and wandering blindly in the dark. If you're gone, and I'm lost, and I am searching for you, frantic; if I cry out your name trying to find you (trying to find my way, trying to find something missing). If I call out to you because I'm alone, because I'm afraid; if I'm afraid of the vast empty night, or how it is filled with danger, with evil, with wicked trees that reach and grasp and things that mean only harm. Afraid of how all the empty spaces are filled up with more empty spaces, and solitary misunderstanding and not understanding -- not understanding anything at all, and everything a different language, the wrong one, and it's all so noisy it drops into only silence anyway, and it crushes in our eardrums with the hollow of it all. If we're walking together, in the woods, in the dark, and now I am walking in the woods alone and the night is heavy and blank and the silence overwhelming waits to sink its teeth into my skin; I can feel it waiting, crouched, red-glow eyes, smell it sense it. Waiting. And you aren't there; you are just exactly nowhere (and I am nowhere, because I don't know where I am, or where we were, or how we got here). If I scream your name until all that's left is raw, and exposed edges, until I lose my voice (because I have lost myself, because I am lost and you are lost and we are here which is nowhere which is nothing, and it's all raw edges and the taste of bleeding). If this is what happens -- here is the book, and it has fallen open to this page, to this story, and now that's all there is, and it has to slowly too-fast rush forward to the end (which is blank, because this is nothing, and nowhere, and it erases itself before our eyes). If space is vacuum (we cannot breathe, it suffocates, and you cannot hear me screaming) then what is time? Dust, crumbling. Gone. Everywhere.


If you hear me calling for you, desperate, broken; if you see me lost, blind-running through the woods, branches catching in my hair, at my clothes, and the night is long and cold and the day is longer and colder and if I close my eyes maybe I will finally see something real. If you hear me -- if it's possible, from where you are, from no place, from not existing except in a memory or a dream or old letters never written -- if you hear me calling, and you whisper back, echoing through my head, silent, that I am not lost. That there are no woods, the trees aren't wicked because the trees aren't there at all; that I am wrong and it is a day that makes your eyes squint bright, and none of this was ever anything. If you say that, and nothing else (help me, I'm lost -- take my hand, draw me a map, be a guide; no, you aren't lost because you aren't anywhere, certainly not where you think you are, and there is no map for there is no here, so just be quiet and stop imagining places where there is only empty space and vacancy). If you do. That changes nothing, offers no help. You can't un-make a world by simply saying No, there isn't. It isn't. You aren't. You can't say No, this isn't, and offer no alternatives; reality is real until there is something realer to swallow it up, replace it. The story's end stays ended if you just stop writing.


If you reached out to take my hand; if you painted me a different picture. If you showed me that trees weren't waiting to attack, to harm, but were solid and benign and filled with singing birds and friendly squirrels and owls staring down at us, watchful. If you broke through the seal of vacuum endless empty with a quiet assurance, with a better story, with an end that hadn't ended yet, that wouldn't stop here, that wouldn't stop. If the trees weren't trees at all, and the woods weren't woods, and where we were or where we are is somewhere more than nowhere, and doesn't just fall off the world to nothing, infinite. If you planted a seed that grew into a world that expanded to a universe entire, or spoke slow warm honey into my ears; if you could point at us on a map, in the sky, under the moon. If the silence wasn't waiting, pulsing, in the dark, because the darkness wasn't, because every word you wrote was fireflies, and every sound that passed your lips lit them up like beacons, shining. If things were different, then things wouldn't be the same, and maybe everything could change. If you weren't, if I wasn't; if we were.