Rising
I was Caught
It felt like a punch in the stomach.
Every breath that I had ever taken slipped out of me in the way that helium seeps out of popped balloons, with a loud crack and a soft whoosh that you hear only if you listen very closely. I could hear the silence of the world and its faint heartbeat around me, time moving in the same long ticks that it did on the clocks I used to see from beneath the trees. The seconds, as they passed, seemed more like the years that we spent in waiting, hidden beneath the grasses and lying in shallow pools with animals moving through us into the cool of the water. There were years that passed before I blinked, moving like milliseconds between seeing one cloud and the next, one sunrise and the next. But there were long years that moved by like watching a stone pulled from one side of the quarries to the other, ancient though they had been built just days before, with backs broken and ropes pulling at hands that bled and tore like paper.
I could remember the painful moments that passed like years after that day—old even then, we watched with eyes that remembered blood and fire and pulled souls from the rubble with shaking and tired hands. That day, stone had crumbled like dust beneath the fingers of a power that even we did not understand or have an explanation for, that saw no god or man that stood in its way. Things were different then, when these humans were secluded and understood nothing of one another, their customs and beliefs as unfamiliar and strange to each other as they were in my eyes. The humans changed but everything else beneath them remained the same, including the force that slowly worked against them and challenged their every move. It worked against them in the same quiet way the snow fell to the ground white and slowly turned into nothing but darkness, from beautiful to nothing and nothing to water that ran through the sewers beneath their streets. And of course there were those who worked with it, but they were the stuff of memory to most. I could feel their presence, then, suddenly, like the noise of a city when I came to that day.
Every breath I had ever taken slipped from what had been my lungs and rose into the air in the form of steam, like something that I had never seen before though it was all too familiar. And the ache of the ground beneath echoed through my bones sent me spinning from where I had been into a whole new land, where the greenery swayed above me and the stars shone like gems.
Every breath that I had ever taken slipped out of me in the way that helium seeps out of popped balloons, with a loud crack and a soft whoosh that you hear only if you listen very closely. I could hear the silence of the world and its faint heartbeat around me, time moving in the same long ticks that it did on the clocks I used to see from beneath the trees. The seconds, as they passed, seemed more like the years that we spent in waiting, hidden beneath the grasses and lying in shallow pools with animals moving through us into the cool of the water. There were years that passed before I blinked, moving like milliseconds between seeing one cloud and the next, one sunrise and the next. But there were long years that moved by like watching a stone pulled from one side of the quarries to the other, ancient though they had been built just days before, with backs broken and ropes pulling at hands that bled and tore like paper.
I could remember the painful moments that passed like years after that day—old even then, we watched with eyes that remembered blood and fire and pulled souls from the rubble with shaking and tired hands. That day, stone had crumbled like dust beneath the fingers of a power that even we did not understand or have an explanation for, that saw no god or man that stood in its way. Things were different then, when these humans were secluded and understood nothing of one another, their customs and beliefs as unfamiliar and strange to each other as they were in my eyes. The humans changed but everything else beneath them remained the same, including the force that slowly worked against them and challenged their every move. It worked against them in the same quiet way the snow fell to the ground white and slowly turned into nothing but darkness, from beautiful to nothing and nothing to water that ran through the sewers beneath their streets. And of course there were those who worked with it, but they were the stuff of memory to most. I could feel their presence, then, suddenly, like the noise of a city when I came to that day.
Every breath I had ever taken slipped from what had been my lungs and rose into the air in the form of steam, like something that I had never seen before though it was all too familiar. And the ache of the ground beneath echoed through my bones sent me spinning from where I had been into a whole new land, where the greenery swayed above me and the stars shone like gems.