Tag: desert

Trudge, part two

March 17th, 2024

Vicesimus Sextus Gradus

Marsden’s boot pressed into the dusty, split earth, eager to soar through the air again. His pace was quick and his face full of the joy in his heart. The sun drew sweat from his skin like a bucket draws water from a well, but he kept up. The merciless air sucked the breath from his lungs, but he kept up.

The cacti applauded his advance. Or so he imagined, or so was the case.

Ah! He seethed into the wind as a fine, long stroke of pain coursed up his forearm. He paused, the wind gently lofting dust around him. Peeling back the layers of his bandages, Marsden inspected the wound. The healing was coming along well. Too well, in fact, for a man who’d been secluded from medicine and in the wilderness for…

How long? How long ’til I am reunited with them?

He pours water—the freshest water his canteen has held—over the gash-turned-cut. The pain recedes, swept away by the flow. The salty, bloody water rushes down his tan arm and off his worn fingers, sprinkling the ground. Marsden pats the cut dry, then replaces the bandages as he makes off again toward the town.

No time to focus anymore on the evidences of the desert critters. No notice is given to the cursive of the snakes, the dens of the jack-rabbits, the footprints of the birds. There is no time to invest in the details of the journey, for Marsden was busy rejoicing at the destination, grateful for the revelation, bustling in his mind with thanksgiving and love. Ah!

Marsden wonders at how the fellows will receive him. Will they welcome his return? She, and he, and he may. Will they sneer, or mock? He will, she, she and he may, too. His lips draw apart, his teeth gleaming in the bright sun, and he smiles at the thought of all the people welcoming him back in their myriad ways. He smiles, eager to share with them all.

He imagines the town, but sees no picture, as he trudges toward it. Rather, he feels the town in his heart as the faces of his friends and his enemies, his neighbors, parade through his mind. He hears their voices singing with him in the chapel, their whispers conspiring to kill him in the dark. He feels their sadness seep into his soul through their faces, and he feels their happiness warm his heart through their eyes.

He hurries now, his walk an unfamiliar bubble.

He feels apart from them. Kept apart by the desert that lays between them. Kept apart by their struggling to grasp at what doesn’t exist, like he had tried to do.

How long? How long until I can be with them?

He feels apart from himself, as well, as if there is some new thing that has replaced him. Some new him that is no longer him but is now fully him. A him that is plagued by the ghosts of the old, but which pays them no mind, for the new is a him that stands apart from, but always with, the prior. It’s… a better him living a better life.

He wonders how much longer the vanity of the desert will surround him, how much longer his pride will continue to impose its consequence.

Oh, the tragedy!

That in my despair, I had carried myself so far from the task now revealed, the one task that matters, the one comfort that I have been called to, now held so far away!

Rippling skin, yelping muscles, his heart skips a beat and he jumps in the air, excited by the joy in his soul.

Indeed I may be wiped away by the storms of this accursed world. My body is of dust, and destined to dust return, but within writhes an immortal soul! Yes, our bodies will melt away in the sun, or be consumed by beasts, or buried and rotted under the earth. But the earth itself is being weathered by an even greater wind. What a joy! What a great…

He leaps again, clapping into the air.

…relief! The waves of eternity are eroding the despairing world. Eroding, not merely to destroy, but to adopt into perfect eternity. All will be as it should be. Look! See the withered cacti? See the animal corpses strewn about me, their blood and gore scattered by the scavengers? Blessed are they who are dead and relieved from this earth, for all here is vain, but they are tasting now the glory yet to arrive. I pray I might join them soon!

Later. Later, I will die. First I must reach the town, and I must eat. Yes, I will break bread with my friends and my foes, and with them I will share. I will smile, I will invite them into joy!

Experience the promise, dearest friends, all of you! That there is a whole life beyond the pain we endure, or the things we hate, or the meaninglessness we bear. There is hope, in the wilderness, and here, and everywhere, if only it grows it your heart.

Dust rises from his feet as he trades wild ground for that settled by his fellows. His pace quickens, restrained only by his awareness of the necessity of breath for speech.

“Look!” Marsden shouts in the town square, pointing to the wilderness from which he came. “That is where I found it. The greatest comfort, the depth of joy. My heart yearned for what I cannot understand. I thought it was there, but it is not. The same strange thing your hearts yearn for. Blessed will you be, you who are true, and meek, and who hold dear the ungraspable truth!”
Trudge, part one

March 15th, 2024

Vicesimus Quartus Gradus

Marsden’s boot pressed into the ground with that satisfying crunnch again, then again, his ears relishing the noise. The sole of his boot molded the cracked dirt with the softness of a thumb rubbed over a lover’s wrist, leaving a signature of love imprinted upon the wilderness by which he was so smitten. The wilderness enveloped him, its comfort tight and warm around his soul.

The cacti, denouncing the desert’s parching heat with their stores of moisture, surrounded him. In his periphery they became silhouettes of the friends he once knew. They disappeared behind him as he walked.

The sand, cracked dirt, parchment drawn upon by the beasts and vipers and birds, gripped Marsden’s attention as he soaked in every detail. His dreams rendered the minutest detail of the landscape with picturesque accuracy. A detail which escaped even his waking mind, but which to his unconscious self seemed the most important fact of all Creation. By morning, the detail is wiped away by the silent wind of vanity, the destroyer of record in both dream and reality.

Marsden wondered when he, too, would be removed from record by the wind, falling to the sand, collapsing into dust.

Later, later. The answer is always later.

Presently, a pain seethes on his forearm, tearing attention away from the wilderness. Marsden turns to a deep gash on his arm, shabbily wrapped in bloody bandages. He pauses his step and places the pad of his finger and thumb on either side of the fleshy crevice. Pinching, he hears the gentle gsh of flesh reuniting, of blood being roused from pools within his skin. A thin streak of bright red appears on the darkened bandage above the gash. The pain subsides, and he carries on, scanning the desert for a suitable place to rest for a moment.

He settles upon a slight dune to rewrap the gash. Then he takes a sip of whiskey.

Overcome by temptation, he turns his head back along his path, scanning the horizon. There is nothing to see but the edge of where he has been and where he can not reach. Yes, the town is out of sight, put behind him. But for all his love of the wilderness, he cannot kill the adulterous longing in his heart for return. He cannot put the dusty, pale boards out of mind; the packed, trodden roads out of mind; the jesting and birthing and rearing and gossip and betrayal and joy and hatred and murder and music and drinking and preaching and cursing. Those things which seem to evade the erasing wind, stored away from the weathering wilderness. But surely they, too, must succumb and meet their end?

Even the cactus dries up in the scorching sun.

A bead of sweat rolls over his dirty face, trudging over his pores and flecks of sand, parading through his hairs, desperate to touch down on the sand and burst into mist.

Marsden tears his eyes away from the horizon, stands, rightens himself, and hears that satisfying crunnch again, moving away from that temple of man and into the heart of the Earth.

How far? He wonders, How far must I go to be apart from them?

And in the back of his mind, the itch to turn whispers, always swaying like a sign in a breeze, always lurking like a spirit in a graveyard, coaxing one more glance toward the town, on threat that this time, when he glances, he will take a step toward it.

How far? He wonders, How far must I go to be apart from myself?

When I go until I cannot go any longer, will I at last collapse into dust, and will then my stricken pile be dismissed from corporation by the first gust? Will I be but as hundreds of flecks, irrevocably separated, yet unified, still clinging to legacy, my legacy, the murderer, the healer, the griever, the rejoicer, the regretful, the contented, the proud, the generous, the wise and the fool? Apart, but bound together by the air which roused my selves from their former companionship and cast out to all the world? Apart, but bound together by origin; I will cease to be, and be yet.

Then, I will still be when I am no more? Will the wind return and wipe my remains away, completing my destruction? Surely, they are doomed to be washed away by the wind, and so I have left them. But here, too, the wind snatches the sand, and the animals lay their corpses down, and they become dust.

I thought that here, surrounded by the death of life, that I could wrestle the wind into submission? That apart from them, nature would preserve me?

No, I am them, and they are me, and here, too, the wind will reach me, and I have no better chance of wrestling it away when comes that fateful morn.

Marsden spat through a frown, scorning the wilderness as he might a challenging duelist.

Whether I wrestle here, or I wrestle there, the match is lost.

With the sun rising overhead, Marsden continued trudging through the desert, away from them and toward his end, contemplating these and other matters.

Tag: desert

Trudge, part two

Vicesimus Sextus Gradus

Trudge, part one

Vicesimus Quartus Gradus