Rising
I was Lost
Cities move so quickly.
It was easy to lose myself amongst the shadows and the trails of life that the humans left through the city, somewhere between where a life ended and another began—because, you know, the two always go hand in hand, whether people acknowledge it or not. When someone’s soul filters away from their body, rising up with the heat and into the sky, another life begins, somewhere, perhaps far off and perhaps within city lines. And it was so easy to become lost amongst all of it, lives beginning and lives ending in the same hour, moment, second. They called us Keepers for a reason, more than that we moved with the tides and the wind and the rise and fall of the sun, leaving things as they were and trying to restore them to the way they had been. We set aside memories of people, places and things for proper storage somewhere in a person’s mind, removed spare pieces of soul that clung to the heartstrings of the place that it had always been, allowed the smallest of things to slip through our fingers. Sometimes the smallest things were the hardest to let go of. Children—babies, their lives so short the minutes could be counted on fingers and toes—and sometimes the elderly, their hope leaving them just as quickly as their souls did.
It was easy to lose myself amongst the shadows and the trails of life that the humans left through the city, somewhere between where a life ended and another began—because, you know, the two always go hand in hand, whether people acknowledge it or not. When someone’s soul filters away from their body, rising up with the heat and into the sky, another life begins, somewhere, perhaps far off and perhaps within city lines. And it was so easy to become lost amongst all of it, lives beginning and lives ending in the same hour, moment, second. They called us Keepers for a reason, more than that we moved with the tides and the wind and the rise and fall of the sun, leaving things as they were and trying to restore them to the way they had been. We set aside memories of people, places and things for proper storage somewhere in a person’s mind, removed spare pieces of soul that clung to the heartstrings of the place that it had always been, allowed the smallest of things to slip through our fingers. Sometimes the smallest things were the hardest to let go of. Children—babies, their lives so short the minutes could be counted on fingers and toes—and sometimes the elderly, their hope leaving them just as quickly as their souls did.