Tag: Short Stories

Dispatches from the Splinters of My Mind — Entry #34

I started walking because there wasn’t anything else to do with myself.

That’s not entirely true. There were dishes in the sink, unopened boxes stacked against the bedroom wall, messages on my phone from people who had gradually stopped asking whether I was all right and started asking whether I was alive. There were forms from the unemployment office, a refrigerator containing mustard, half a carton of eggs, and something in a plastic container I had stopped trusting several days earlier. There were books I could have read, television I could have watched, sleep I could have attempted. There were plenty of things to do.

There just wasn’t anything I wanted to do.

That distinction had become important.

Somewhere during the previous eighteen months, my life had changed from something I participated in to something I maintained. Wake. Shower. Coffee. Applications. Groceries. Bills. Phone calls returned three days late. Laundry when underwear became a logistical concern. Eat because the body apparently insists upon being consulted. Sleep badly. Repeat.

Nothing catastrophic had happened, which somehow made explaining it worse.

Mara left in February. My father died in April. The company eliminated my department in June after seventeen years and thanked me for my service with a cardboard box and a packet explaining COBRA. In August, my oldest friend stopped calling after I canceled dinner for the fourth time. By October, I had moved into an apartment where the previous tenant’s furniture marks remained pressed into the carpet like fossils.

None of those things destroyed me.

That’s what people misunderstand about disappearing.

You don’t always vanish in an explosion. Sometimes you leave yourself the way a shoreline disappears beneath the tide—an inch here, another there, nothing dramatic enough to photograph until somebody notices the house is standing in water.

So I walked.

At first, I called it exercise.

Then stress management.

Then something to help me sleep.

Eventually I stopped lying.

I walked because every night around eleven, my apartment became too quiet to tolerate.

The city was better in the rain.

Rain removed obligation from things. Nobody expected conversation beneath an umbrella. Nobody wondered why you were alone. Everyone walked with purpose even when they had none, shoulders hunched, heads lowered, moving between islands of fluorescent light while tires whispered across black pavement.

I liked becoming anonymous among them.

On dry nights, people had faces. In rain, they became coats and umbrellas, reflections sliding across shop windows, bodies briefly illuminated by headlights before disappearing again.

The first time I saw myself, I was crossing Ninth Street.

He stood on the opposite corner beneath the red glow of a pharmacy sign, hands inside the pockets of a black coat.

My coat.

Not the one I was wearing.

The old one.

Leather, knee-length, ridiculous in retrospect, although at twenty-eight I had believed it made me look dangerous.

The man wearing it looked twenty-eight.

The light changed.

People moved between us.

Someone bumped my shoulder and muttered something.

When the crowd cleared, he was gone.

I stood in the crosswalk until a taxi leaned on its horn.

I told myself resemblance.

Cities manufacture doubles. Give enough strangers similar haircuts and winter coats and eventually somebody will look enough like you to ruin an evening.

I went home.

The next night, I walked the same route.

I didn’t see him.

The night after that, I did.

This version was older.

Thirty-five, maybe thirty-six.

He sat inside a restaurant beside a woman whose face I couldn’t see, laughing so hard his head tilted backward.

I knew that laugh.

Mine before I learned to ration it.

I stopped outside the window.

Rain ran down the glass between us, bending his face.

The woman reached across the table and touched his hand.

He turned.

Saw me.

The laughter disappeared.

For several seconds we stared at each other through the window.

Then a bus passed.

When it cleared, the table was empty.

Not abandoned.

Empty.

No plates.

No glasses.

No woman.

A waiter wiped the spotless surface with a white cloth.

I walked home faster than usual.

The following night, I took a different street.

He was waiting there too.

After that, I began seeing versions of myself everywhere.

One boarded a train as I reached the platform. Another climbed into the back of a taxi. I saw a gray-haired version smoking outside a hotel and a younger one standing beneath an awning kissing somebody whose face disappeared behind an umbrella.

They were never exactly where I could reach them.

Twenty yards.

Half a block.

The opposite platform.

Across four lanes of traffic.

Close enough to recognize.

Far enough to doubt.

I began walking farther.

The city began answering.

At least, that’s what I thought.

The first sign appeared beside a bus shelter.

SOME PEOPLE JUST KEEP GOING.

Advertising, probably.

I couldn’t remember what it was selling.

Three blocks later:

STILL HERE. STILL HUMAN.

I stopped beneath it.

The rain ticked against the metal frame overhead.

“Fuck you,” I said.

A woman waiting for the bus moved several feet away.

Fair enough.

The next evening another billboard read:

A QUIETER KIND OF STRENGTH.

I laughed.

“You’re laying it on a little thick.”

Nobody answered.

Two nights later, the messages changed.

YOU USED TO TURN LEFT HERE.

I stopped.

The sign hung above a closed electronics store.

I had turned left there.

Years ago.

There had been a bar on Jefferson called Milo’s. My friend David and I went every Thursday after work, back when Thursday meant something besides the day before Friday.

I turned left.

Milo’s was gone.

A laundromat occupied the space.

But through its fogged windows, for perhaps three seconds, I saw bar stools.

Pool table.

David waving from the back.

Then somebody opened the laundromat door and warm detergent-scented air rolled across the sidewalk.

Rows of washing machines.

No David.

The next sign said:

YOU DON’T LIKE WHAT’S DOWN THAT STREET.

I went anyway.

Apparently I had retained at least one recognizable personality trait.

The street narrowed.

Neon thinned.

Traffic became distant.

Halfway down the block, a man stood beneath the awning of a closed tailor shop smoking a cigarette.

Black leather coat.

Twenty-eight.

Me.

I stopped.

He looked up.

“You took your time.”

His voice was mine, except younger, carrying an arrogance I’d forgotten possessing.

“Are you me?”

He smiled.

“I used to be.”

I moved closer.

Up close, the differences hurt.

No lines around the eyes. More hair. Shoulders held differently. He inhabited his body as though he’d never considered apologizing for occupying space.

I hated him immediately.

I envied him even faster.

“I’ve been looking for you.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

He took a drag.

“Because you think I know where you went.”

Rain drummed against the awning.

“I want my life back.”

He laughed.

Not cruelly.

That somehow irritated me more.

“Which one?”

“The one before all this.”

“Before Mara?”

“Before everything.”

“Your father?”

I said nothing.

“The job?”

Nothing.

“David?”

“Shut up.”

He flicked ash into the gutter.

“You keep talking about losing yourself like I was something worth preserving.”

That landed harder than I expected.

“I was happy.”

“No. You were busy.”

“I had a life.”

“You had momentum. That’s not the same thing.”

I wanted to hit him.

He seemed to know.

“You want me back because you remember me selectively. You remember the coat. The job. The friends. You don’t remember how scared I was all the goddamn time.”

“I wasn’t scared.”

He smiled.

“See?”

A taxi passed, throwing water across the curb.

I turned away.

When I looked back, the awning was empty.

Only a cigarette remained in the gutter, hissing in the rain.

I kept walking.

Not because I expected answers anymore.

Because stopping felt worse.

I met others.

Forty-two stood inside a convenience store staring at lottery tickets.

Fifty sat alone on a bench feeding pieces of bread to pigeons despite a sign prohibiting it.

Thirty-one walked past holding Mara’s hand.

She looked happy.

I didn’t follow them.

The version from the week after my father’s funeral sat on the steps of a church.

I recognized him immediately.

Same shirt I’d worn for three days.

Same beard.

Same vacant expression people mistake for strength when a man doesn’t cry where they can see him.

I sat beside him.

For a while neither of us spoke.

Finally I asked, “Are you the one?”

He shook his head.

“Who am I looking for?”

He pointed down the street.

Of course he did.

Apparently every version of me was committed to being cryptic.

I stood.

Before leaving, I looked back.

“Does it get easier?”

He stared at the rain.

“I wouldn’t know.”

I understood.

He hadn’t survived it yet.

I left him there.

The city grew quieter as I walked.

Storefronts darkened. Traffic disappeared. Even the rain softened until individual drops became audible against my coat.

The signs continued.

NOT THIS ONE.

KEEP WALKING.

YOU ALREADY PASSED HIM.

Then:

STOP LOOKING BACK.

I did.

Nobody.

When I faced forward again, someone stood at the end of the block.

Same coat I was wearing.

Same shoulders.

Same age.

Same tired posture.

Me.

Not younger.

Not older.

I approached slowly.

He waited beneath a streetlight.

Rain streamed from his hair.

“So you’re me.”

He shook his head.

“Not yet.”

I stared at him.

“What does that mean?”

“You know.”

“No, actually, I’m getting pretty goddamn tired of everyone assuming that.”

He almost smiled.

I recognized that too.

“Are you what happens to me?”

“Maybe.”

“How far?”

He shrugged.

“Tomorrow. Ten years. Forty minutes.”

“Do I get better?”

He looked down the empty street.

“Better than what?”

“This.”

I gestured at myself.

He considered me for a long time.

Then said, “You’re still treating yourself like a place you can return to.”

I didn’t answer.

“You keep asking where you went. You didn’t go anywhere.”

“Then why don’t I recognize myself?”

“Because you’re looking for someone who doesn’t exist anymore.”

The words should have hurt.

Instead they felt strangely ordinary.

Like being told a store had closed.

I looked back toward the city.

Somewhere behind us were all the people I’d been.

Twenty-eight beneath the awning.

Thirty-one holding Mara’s hand.

The man outside the funeral.

The husband.

The employee.

The friend.

The son.

All of them temporary.

All of them convinced, while they existed, that they were the permanent version.

When I turned back, the man was walking away.

“Where are you going?”

He didn’t stop.

I followed.

We walked until the rain began thinning into mist.

I stayed perhaps twenty feet behind him.

Every intersection he crossed, I crossed.

Every corner he turned, I turned.

For once I wasn’t trying to catch him.

That mattered.

I don’t know why.

The eastern sky began changing, black becoming charcoal.

He turned one final corner.

I followed.

Empty street.

No man.

No footsteps.

Nothing except shuttered businesses and rainwater running along the curb.

Above a closed shop, a rectangular sign glowed.

YOU ARE HERE.

I stood beneath it.

“No shit.”

The city offered no rebuttal.

Across the street, a dark storefront reflected the sidewalk.

I saw myself.

Wet hair.

Black coat.

Hands inside pockets.

Tired face.

Older than I remembered becoming.

I waited for the reflection to move without me.

It didn’t.

I raised my right hand.

It raised its left.

I stepped closer.

So did he.

Normal.

Perfectly, beautifully normal.

I almost laughed.

Instead I stood there looking at him.

Not the man before Mara.

Not the son before the funeral.

Not the employee before the cardboard box.

Not whoever I had been before things started disappearing.

Just the poor bastard standing in the rain.

For the first time, I didn’t ask whether I recognized him.

A city bus passed behind me.

In the reflection, it passed too.

When it was gone, someone was standing twenty yards behind my reflected self.

Same black coat.

Head lowered.

Walking.

I turned around.

The sidewalk behind me was empty.

When I looked back at the glass, the man was closer.

I didn’t turn again.

He kept walking.

So did I.

Dispatches from the Splinters of My Mind — Entry 32

I woke standing waist-deep in water.

Cold was the first thing I understood.

Not where I was. Not how I’d gotten there. Not why the sky looked as though someone had driven a black nail through the sun.

Cold.

The water had worked through my clothes and settled against my skin with the intimacy of something that had been waiting. My feet were buried ankle-deep in mud. Every time I shifted my weight, the bottom tightened around my boots as if reconsidering whether it intended to let me leave.

I stood still.

Sometimes ignorance deserves a moment before you start fucking with it.

The lake stretched farther than I could see, flat except for rings spreading outward from my body. Mist crawled across its surface. Beyond it, pieces of buildings rose from the shoreline—columns, broken roofs, staircases climbing toward entrances that no longer existed. They looked ancient, although I couldn’t have told you why.

Perhaps ruin has its own calendar.

Above them hung the eclipse.

A perfect black circle surrounded by white fire.

I stared at it longer than I should have.

Then something bumped my hip.

I nearly screamed.

A face floated beside me.

I stumbled backward, lost one boot to the mud, caught myself, and watched the face roll lazily in the water.

Stone.

A mask.

Human-sized. Heavy-looking. Eyes closed. Lips slightly parted.

Another drifted behind it.

Then I noticed there were dozens.

Maybe hundreds.

Faces floated everywhere.

Some stared upward. Others sank nose-first beneath the surface before rolling back. A woman’s face drifted past with one cheek broken away. An old man’s mask had no mouth. Something resembling a child’s theatrical mask—

No.

Not a child.

Just small.

I stopped looking at the faces and started looking for land.

That was when I saw the crowns.

They floated too, which made no sense.

Bronze, silver, blackened metal. Some elaborate enough to belong in museums, others little more than twisted bands. One passed close enough that I could see tiny stones set into its rim.

I reached for it.

The instant my fingers touched metal, I remembered ordering a man hanged.

I let go.

The crown splashed away.

My stomach clenched.

For one impossible second I had been standing on a balcony.

Below me, a courtyard packed with people.

Rain.

Red banners hanging from stone walls.

A man kneeling with his hands bound.

I remembered his name.

Tomas.

I remembered signing the order.

I remembered not watching when the rope tightened.

Then I was back in the lake.

“No.”

My voice traveled across the water.

Nothing answered.

I knew no Tomas.

I had never ordered anyone killed.

I had never stood on a balcony above a courtyard.

At least I didn’t think I had.

That’s the problem with memory.

We treat it like evidence because the alternative is admitting most of our lives are stored in something with the structural integrity of wet paper.

Another object bumped my arm.

A mask.

I pushed it away.

It rolled over.

Something had been carved inside.

Letters.

I caught the edge before it drifted past.

MICHAEL.

The name tightened something in my chest.

My mother called me Michael when she was angry.

Everyone else called me Mike.

I dropped it.

Another mask floated within reach.

I turned it over.

SERGEANT.

The next:

DAD.

I stared at that one for a long time.

I don’t have children.

At least—

No.

I don’t have children.

I threw the mask.

It struck the water and disappeared.

A few seconds later it surfaced farther away, staring at the eclipse.

I began walking.

Every step required negotiation with the mud.

The ruins seemed close, but distance behaved strangely there. I walked toward a temple with six surviving columns until my legs trembled, yet it never appeared any nearer.

The masks followed.

Not all of them.

Just enough.

Michael.

Sergeant.

Dad.

A cracked one marked HUSBAND.

Another said LIAR.

That one I left facedown.

The crowns kept their distance.

I was grateful.

Overhead, birds circled.

Ravens, I thought.

Too many to count.

Their wings overlapped until portions of the sky seemed to move.

One descended low over the water.

Its reflection passed beneath it.

Except the reflection wasn’t a bird.

I stopped.

The raven crossed above me.

Below, something human walked across the underside of the lake.

A man.

Then another.

Then dozens.

Their reflections moved beneath the surface as casually as pedestrians crossing a plaza, some alone, some together, all upside down from where I stood.

I looked toward the ruins.

Their reflections were intact.

The broken temple became whole beneath the water.

Columns restored.

Roof unbroken.

Lights burning inside.

My breath caught.

I knew that place.

Not recognized.

Knew.

I had walked those steps carrying flowers.

White ones.

Someone had been waiting inside.

I couldn’t remember her face.

But I remembered loving her.

The memory hurt enough to make me bend forward.

My hand touched the water.

Stars scattered beneath my fingers.

I jerked back.

The sky above was filled with stars despite the eclipse.

The lake held the same constellations.

For several seconds I couldn’t tell where the sky ended.

Then I noticed what was missing.

Me.

The temple reflected.

The birds reflected as people.

The eclipse burned beneath the water like a second black sun.

The masks had pale doubles below them.

I had nothing.

I waved my hand.

No hand moved beneath mine.

I leaned closer.

Only stars.

Then something moved far below.

A shape approached through the darkness.

A man.

He rose until he stood beneath my feet.

Upside down.

Or I was.

Water separated us.

He wore my face.

Same nose.

Same scar along the chin.

Same thinning hair.

But his clothes were dry.

Behind him stretched another shoreline.

The temples there were whole.

People moved between them.

He stared at me.

I stared back.

Then he raised his right hand.

I raised mine.

His expression changed.

So did mine.

We both lowered our hands.

He raised his left.

I didn’t.

His eyes widened.

I raised mine.

He didn’t.

Neither of us moved after that.

A crown bumped my ribs.

I ignored it.

The man beneath the water looked toward something behind me.

His face changed.

Fear.

I turned.

Nothing.

Mist.

Masks.

Ruins.

When I looked down again, he was pounding against the underside of the surface.

His mouth moved.

No sound reached me.

“What?”

He struck the water harder.

The lake didn’t ripple.

I crouched until my face hovered inches above his.

“What are you saying?”

Again.

Two words.

I watched his mouth carefully.

Don’t move.

Something touched my shoulder.

I froze.

Not because he had warned me.

Because I remembered this.

The lake.

The hand.

The man beneath the water.

I remembered standing exactly here.

Except I had been below.

I remembered looking upward at a terrified man surrounded by ruins.

I remembered trying to warn him.

I remembered failing.

The hand tightened.

Warm fingers.

Human.

Behind me, someone breathed.

The man beneath the lake stopped pounding.

His face became strangely calm.

Almost relieved.

Then he stepped backward.

“No.”

He continued away.

“Wait.”

The hand on my shoulder turned me around.

There was nobody there.

Only a mask floating upright.

My face.

Not similar.

Mine.

Its eyes were open.

I grabbed it.

Inside was a single word.

REFLECTION.

The lake moved.

For the first time since I woke, waves spread across its surface.

The ruins distorted.

The eclipse fractured.

Stars stretched into white scars.

Below me, the other man began walking toward the intact temple.

“Hey!”

He didn’t turn.

“Which one of us is real?”

That stopped him.

Slowly, he looked back.

Even through the water, I saw him smile.

Not mockingly.

Sadly.

Then he pointed upward.

At me.

For one stupid, beautiful second, relief flooded through my body.

Me.

I was real.

I laughed.

The sound came out broken.

Then I noticed his finger wasn’t pointing at me.

It pointed beyond me.

At the sky.

I looked up.

The eclipse had begun to move.

Not the moon.

The entire sky.

Stars slid sideways. Darkness rippled. The ravens scattered as though frightened by something behind the heavens.

A thin line appeared across the firmament.

Perfectly straight.

From one horizon to the other.

Light leaked through it.

Not sunlight.

Something white and depthless.

The sky was opening along a seam.

Below me, the other man ran.

I tried to follow.

My feet wouldn’t move.

The mud had tightened around my ankles.

The masks gathered.

Michael.

Sergeant.

Dad.

Husband.

Liar.

Stranger.

Names I knew.

Names I didn’t.

Crowns floated among them.

Lives I remembered.

Lives I couldn’t possibly have lived.

Above, the seam widened.

Below, the intact city disappeared into darkness as the other man reached the temple steps.

He looked back once.

I raised my hand.

This time he raised his.

Perfectly.

I don’t know which of us did it first.

The white opening in the sky grew wider.

The lake began draining upward.

Masks lifted from the surface.

Crowns followed.

Water rose around me in silver threads, climbing toward the wound overhead.

And somewhere beneath my feet, in a world that might have been reflection or memory or the only real place left, the other man entered the temple and closed the door.

I was still standing there when the water reached my knees.

Still standing when it reached my ankles.

Still standing when the lake was gone.

The masks were gone.

The crowns were gone.

The ruins were gone.

There was only black mud beneath my boots and stars above and below me.

Two skies.

No horizon.

No reflection.

And somewhere in the darkness, from a direction I could no longer call beneath me, someone knocked three times.

I have not answered.

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.

Dispatches Of Splinters Of My Mind Entry 29:

Mirrors deceive only those who expect reflections.

The old ones are doors.

I did not remember entering the hall.

Perhaps I never had.

The corridor behind me had dissolved into a darkness so complete it seemed to drink memory itself. Before me rose a mirror taller than any cathedral door, framed in black wood carved with roots, ravens, sleeping kings, and forgotten constellations whose names had been erased from every surviving language. Hundreds of candles burned throughout the chamber, yet none surrendered warmth. Their pale flames trembled without smoke, releasing only the faint fragrance of melting beeswax, cold iron, ancient vellum, and dust so old it carried the dry sweetness of abandoned monasteries. The silence possessed weight. It settled upon my shoulders like a ceremonial cloak, making even breath feel intrusive.

The glass was cracked.

Not broken.

Remembered.

Thousands of silver fractures spread across its surface like rivers frozen beneath winter ice. They caught the candlelight and scattered it into drifting constellations that seemed suspended beneath the glass instead of upon it. The cracks shimmered with impossible depth. Looking into them felt less like studying broken glass than gazing through the veins of reality itself. Every fracture suggested another path. Every path promised another version of the same impossible destination.

He stood where my reflection should have been.

Older.

Not in years.

In burdens.

His robe absorbed the light around it until black itself seemed too pale to describe what I was seeing. Great wings unfolded behind him—not feathered, but woven from living shadow, each movement resembling a murder of ravens lifting from a battlefield after the last soldier had forgotten his own name. Upon his brow rested a crown grown from intertwined branches, thorns, and dead stars whose pale light had long since vanished from the heavens. It did not appear forged.

It appeared inevitable.

He raised one hand.

Slowly.

The motion possessed the unbearable patience of mountains shaping themselves through centuries of wind.

I hesitated.

Not because I feared him.

Because somewhere beneath memory…

I recognized him.

Recognition is rarely comforting.

The air between us became impossibly thin. Ancient glass separated us, yet it felt no thicker than skin. My breathing slowed until every inhale echoed inside my chest like wind passing through cathedral ruins. I heard the faint rasp of cloth shifting against my coat. The soft creak of leather beneath my boots. The steady pulse of blood inside my ears.

Then another sound emerged.

Not his breathing.

Mine.

Older.

Deeper.

Each breath carried the cadence of someone who had witnessed civilizations bloom into dust and still found reason to continue walking. It sounded like my lungs remembering a rhythm my life had somehow forgotten.

The mirror did not reflect who I was.

It reflected who had survived every version of me.

My hand rose almost without permission.

So did his.

Our fingertips stopped an inch apart.

The glass inhaled.

The fractures awakened one by one, veins of silver fire spreading through the mirror until the chamber filled with a faint crystalline hum that vibrated inside my ribs. The sound was neither music nor language. It resembled distant glaciers breaking beneath unseen moons. Beneath the glass unfolded impossible landscapes layered atop one another like memories refusing chronology: forests growing beneath oceans; cities built inside the ribs of sleeping giants; children carrying miniature suns whose warmth smelled faintly of cedar smoke and summer rain; rivers climbing into eclipsed skies where birds flew backward through constellations that no astronomer had ever mapped.

The mirror contained no future.

It contained every possibility abandoned in order to become the person standing before it.

An unexpected grief settled inside me.

Not regret.

Something older.

The sorrow reserved for lives never granted the dignity of existing.

The artist who abandoned the canvas too soon.

The father who spoke too little because silence felt safer than tenderness.

The friend who arrived one day too late.

The stranger whose single act of kindness might have redirected another soul’s entire history.

None accused me.

They simply existed.

Waiting patiently inside the fractures where every unlived decision continued forever, branching into worlds I would never inhabit yet somehow continued to mourn.

His eyes never left mine.

Within them I found neither judgment nor forgiveness.

Only understanding.

Absolute understanding.

The kind that strips every defense from the soul.

His lips never moved.

Yet words entered the chamber with the quiet certainty of snowfall covering forgotten graves.

“Every life believes it is becoming.”

Silence.

The candles bent inward as though listening.

“Few understand they are remembering.”

A cold draft drifted through the hall carrying scents that belonged to no single season—rain striking warm stone, extinguished fireplaces, pine resin, old parchment, cedar chests unopened for generations, and the faint metallic trace of approaching storms. Somewhere beyond the towering arches came the slow beating of unseen wings. Each pulse traveled through the marble floor until the vibration settled beneath my feet like another heartbeat hidden inside the earth.

I searched his face for answers.

Instead…

I found exhaustion.

Not the exhaustion of age.

The exhaustion of waiting.

Waiting so long that time itself had surrendered the habit of counting.

The realization struck with terrifying gentleness.

He had never been imprisoned inside the mirror.

I had.

Every certainty I defended.

Every identity I polished.

Every fear mistaken for truth.

Every role I accepted because it spared me the terrifying freedom of becoming something else.

Each had been another layer of glass placed between us.

The cracks were not evidence of decay.

They were evidence that something inside me had finally become willing to break.

His hand pressed softly against the mirror.

This time…

The glass yielded.

Cold flooded my fingertips—not winter’s cold, but the temperature of water hidden beneath glaciers, stone sleeping beneath mountains, and truths existing long before the first human mouth learned to shape sound into language. It climbed slowly through my hand, my arm, my chest. Every heartbeat echoed through the silver fractures until I could no longer distinguish whether the rhythm belonged to my own heart or to the mirror itself.

For one impossible moment…

I no longer knew which side contained the reflection.

Or whether either side had ever truly been real.

The candles extinguished themselves.

One by one.

Darkness reclaimed the hall with the patient confidence of night returning to a world that had only borrowed daylight.

Only the fractures continued glowing.

When the final flame surrendered, ordinary glass stared back at me.

My reflection had returned.

Smaller than I remembered.

Not diminished.

Merely unfinished.

Deep within the countless silver fractures, almost too distant to distinguish from memory itself, the crowned figure remained motionless.

Watching.

Waiting.

Some thresholds are crossed only once.

Others reveal that they were crossed years ago, and every step taken since has merely been the slow remembering of a meeting the soul has been walking toward since before it ever learned its own name.