Nowhere To Go and The Cave of the Old Offering

You were standing below me somehow, on the bent'ness of the falling stones, no longer falling, but reclined in a descent that must take years for them, to reach the egress of yearning, to requite the love of that slow strong arm of the deeper earth, pulling always, down, down, down. 

 And while with some effort, you retied your shoe, and repacked your bag after retrieving some article of comfort from it, I stood a little higher up, closer to the entry to the cave, frozen by it, and I could not enter.

The weight of its dark mouth, the terror of the nearness of that roof of stone piled so impossibly high and stung by an opening that would have otherwise been hidden by the rush and force of falling waters, I stood, with that cold curtain gone now, and that river that hung it long ago dried, diverted or just stopped from being altogether.  It was just a trail up to a cave now that you and I ended by reaching it, a bit of cliff, and hole beneath it.  The inside of it terrifies me, like death, like suffocation, and I am the one that wanted to come.

I stand as I always have now, at its mouth, at the beginning, having my guts pulled from me and thrown by those forces into the whirling wind, into the void of the cave, into some other world beginning here, inside of myself, and going where on such a pitiless wind?

I am just standing there.

I try to look around, look for old handholds for what must have been a hard climb when this was a river, worlds of time ago.  What could still be seen?  What could still be here? 

“This is it” you asked and said.  Your voice was more a taste in my mouth than an interpretation of those shaking hands, the tongue of dark children.  I could barely see, and could not escape the feeling of pissing myself, though I had no proof of it.

I could not walk into the cave, could not pass the mouth.  I could only stand out front, balanced and leaned against a peculiarity of rocks, too small to be climbed, too large to be disregarded.  Hampered by the sliding and shifting sand and dirt and gravels of the world dissolving, always dissolving and never done.

“There’s a place here, it’s like a shelf” you tell me.  You tell me that it is mostly flat and that he could have lain there or sat.  That it was a very low ceiling, that there were no bones, of animals of anything, that they were all gone.  You told me that is all there is, there is no other place, no deeper entry, no greater room.

What would proof look like?  What would the sign be if the thing I thought had been there, had been there, and gone now surely, but a hint remaining intact, to be seen by the careful eye, looking for just that, but I cannot go in.  I turn and face the way we came, my back the you and the cave, crouch to sit, and when hunched in that great direction that is down, feel a piece of myself again, return from the howling void in the mouth of that impossible cave, and for the briefest of moments, I am there. 

You found things of course, a weird shape in the sand of the cave, a jutting of a rock the size of your arm, an ant lion colony, all natural wonders and beauties of their own.  Mostly the cave smelled of unsettled dirt almost dust.

For all the convenience and wonder of our ship, we have no flashlight, and no cameras.  And after letting that thing go which is right before me, un-touched though the desire to do so brought me here with you, from unverifiable distances, I stepped back, and stepped down, and put that thing away that brought us here across time, to see, to hope, to wonder.  And though I was turned and sitting, I turned and sat again, and the thing that is not tears, but is still tears, was upon me, and I was tired, having met that thing inside myself that I had hoped would be found in a cave; a proof against the impossibility of it, an idol of a thing not man, but not different from one.  A desire to live, to not pass like memories from a world where i was, where we were, from the failure of its own authority over us, from the mouth of the cave I could not enter nor the threshold within myself that I could not cross, here on St. Anne, or in my bunk on the ship, when tears alone come to my own defense, against the evil of time, its way with us here, and me now, dying on a rock beside a door I will not open, a cave I will not enter, and under a truth I cannot honor with words.

There is tea on the ship and we drink it.  Hours pass in silence.  At times, the soft plinking of projectiles on the hull of our ship become a light rain, a natural wonder made common in the experience of it.  The violent skies, just lights that cannot hurt us now. 

I see it.  I see it always.  I cannot turn away.  It is as though I have taken the mouth of that place within, and am struck dumb by it, and all of language is but an itch, all ideas a turn of the head, a meaningless focus of attention upon the starboard panel, a cushioned seat, where you sit, curled, reading, observing a vast emptiness filled with wonders, while I cannot tell the difference between all times, and this cooling cup of tea.