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Dispatches Of Splinters Of My Mind Entry 30:

Nothing is ever truly discarded.

The soul composts what the mind refuses to carry.

The mountain did not exist on any map.

Mountains like this never do.

They rise slowly from forgotten things until memory mistakes them for permanence. By the time anyone notices them, they have already become older than history itself. They are built grain by grain from abandoned dreams, unfinished conversations, unopened letters, unspoken apologies, and names that no living tongue remembers pronouncing. We imagine the past disappears. The mountain knows better. It simply waits until enough of it accumulates to become a landscape.

I began the ascent without deciding to.

The path revealed itself beneath my feet, winding upward through an impossible terrain built not from stone but from the discarded gravity of human lives. Every step settled upon broken clocks whose hands still searched endlessly for vanished hours. Weathered portraits stared upward through cracked glass, their faces softened by rain until strangers and ancestors had become indistinguishable. Rusted keys rested beside unopened journals swollen from damp, cracked violins whose strings had surrendered their final songs, children’s shoes hardened by years of mud, extinguished lanterns smelling faintly of soot, wedding bands polished smooth by decades of love, and books so saturated with storms that their pages had fused into silent monuments.

The air itself carried memory.

Rain settled upon old paper with the sweet scent of mildew and cedar. Moss clung to forgotten objects, releasing the rich fragrance of wet forests after autumn storms. Somewhere beneath everything lingered the metallic trace of iron, as though the mountain itself possessed blood hidden beneath its skin. Each breath tasted of endings that had quietly transformed into beginnings while no one was paying attention.

Snow drifted from the eclipsed sky.

Yet nothing felt cold.

The flakes dissolved before touching my skin, becoming ash…

Then feathers…

Then fragments of handwritten letters whose ink vanished the instant I tried to read them.

The silence was alive.

Not empty.

Listening.

Every footstep disappeared before its echo could return, absorbed by the countless forgotten things buried beneath the path. The quiet pressed gently against my ears until I became aware of smaller sounds—the slow rasp of fabric against my coat, the steady rhythm of my breathing, the faint creak of leather beneath my boots, and somewhere far below, almost imperceptible, the slow heartbeat of the mountain itself.

Behind me, the world dissolved beneath an endless sea of cloud until there remained only the narrow trail climbing toward the summit and the solitary tree silhouetted against the eclipsed sun. Its branches spread across the heavens like veins beneath translucent skin, black against the silver halo surrounding the hidden light. Thousands of ravens circled through its limbs without ever landing, their wings producing a low, rhythmic murmur that sounded less like birds in flight than immense pages turning inside a forgotten library older than language.

The climb grew steeper.

Not because the mountain demanded strength.

Because it demanded surrender.

Every step required abandoning something I had carried without realizing its weight.

The need to understand.

The need to be right.

The need to explain every wound until it resembled justice.

The higher I climbed, the quieter those burdens became.

Along the path stood statues carved from weathered marble.

Some had no faces.

Others possessed only faces.

A mother forever reaching toward a child she could no longer remember.

A soldier lowering his rifle long after every battle had ended.

A poet whose mouth remained open, still searching for the final word that refused to be written.

An old woman smiling toward someone history had forgotten to record.

They did not commemorate greatness.

They commemorated becoming.

I reached out and brushed my fingers across one worn shoulder.

The stone felt unexpectedly warm.

For one impossible heartbeat I smelled woodsmoke curling through winter air. I heard distant laughter around a supper table lit by candlelight. I felt rough callused hands guiding mine across a piece of unfinished wood. The warmth carried the quiet comfort of belonging somewhere I had never been.

Then…

Nothing.

Only stone once more.

The mountain was built from everything humanity believed it had lost.

Nothing here had vanished.

Everything had simply changed its form.

A realization settled slowly into my ribs.

Perhaps grief itself was never the enemy.

Perhaps forgetting was.

We spend our lives believing pain buries us, when often it is quietly planting something whose roots require decades before they reach water.

The higher I climbed, the lighter my body became.

Not because my burdens disappeared.

Because I had finally stopped insisting they belonged to me alone.

Every regret.

Every failure.

Every broken promise.

Every love that ended before either heart was ready.

None had been wasted.

The soul is incapable of waste.

It transforms every sorrow into soil.

Every joy into rain.

Every unanswered question into another ring hidden deep within the trunk of its oldest tree.

That was why the summit glowed.

Not with holiness.

With accumulation.

The tree had grown from everything humanity believed it had left behind.

I reached its roots as the eclipse settled into perfect stillness.

The trunk towered beyond comprehension, its bark folded into spirals resembling fingerprints pressed into living wood by countless unseen hands. Moss wrapped the roots in thick emerald blankets that released the earthy fragrance of rain-soaked forests. Tiny streams wound between them, carrying fragments of starlight instead of water. When I rested my palm against the bark, warmth flowed into my hand—not heat, but recognition.

Then…

The heartbeat.

Slow.

Impossibly slow.

Each pulse seemed separated by entire generations.

Children were born between two beats.

Empires rose and vanished between the next.

The tree remembered differently than we did.

It remembered completely.

The wind finally spoke.

Not with words.

With voices.

Thousands of them.

Children.

Lovers.

Strangers.

Enemies.

Mothers.

Fathers.

The forgotten.

The unborn.

Every voice layered gently atop another until individuality dissolved into something far older than language. I could not distinguish one story from the next, yet somehow understood them all. Every life had entered the roots. Every choice had become another ring within the trunk. Every grief had nourished another branch stretching toward a sky forever hidden behind the eclipse.

Tears gathered before I understood why.

Not from sadness.

From proportion.

For the first time, my life no longer felt isolated.

It felt connected.

A single root among countless others, each feeding something infinitely larger than itself.

I closed my eyes.

The bark beneath my hand grew warmer.

Suddenly I understood why the ferryman had smiled.

Why the labyrinth had refused directions.

Why the mirror had revealed becoming instead of reflection.

None of them had been destinations.

They had been preparations.

The journey had never been leading me toward knowledge.

It had been leading me toward participation.

The tree asked nothing of me.

Not belief.

Not certainty.

Not perfection.

Only presence.

When I opened my eyes, one raven had finally settled upon the highest branch.

It regarded me without fear.

Without judgment.

Without expectation.

Then…

Almost imperceptibly…

The eclipse began to move.

The first rays of sunlight spilled across the mountain, illuminating every broken clock, every weathered portrait, every forgotten object, every unfinished statue. Nothing had been restored.

Nothing had been repaired.

Yet everything had changed.

Not because the world was different.

Because I finally was.

I understood then that the purpose of the climb had never been to leave my past behind.

It had been to discover that every discarded moment, every forgotten face, every unanswered prayer, every mistake I believed had buried me had instead become part of the living ground beneath my feet.

I looked once more toward the ancient tree before beginning the descent.

For the first time since entering the Splinters…

I no longer felt like a traveler.

I felt like a root.

And somewhere beneath the mountain, where forgotten rivers still carried borrowed names toward unseen shores, another path quietly began to grow.