Movement Nine — Those Who Slept Through the Burning

I look around me, in the hours the burning allows for looking, and I see souls who have stopped resisting the passage of time here altogether.

They sleep — if sleep is even the proper word for whatever this is, since nothing here truly rests, not in any sense that would satisfy a soul from the world above. But something close to it, some flattened, unresponsive stillness that has settled over a great many of the souls scattered across this shifting landscape, souls who simply could not hold out against however many centuries the burning has already demanded of them. I watch them sometimes, curled in on themselves against whatever shape the ground has taken that particular hour, enduring without struggle, without protest, the particular exhausted surrender of something that has finally, entirely, run out of fight.

I have not joined them. Not yet. I don't know whether that makes me stronger than they are, or simply more stubborn, or perhaps only more foolish, still burning with something bright enough to keep the rest of me upright when every sensible part of a soul this old should have given out long before now. I think, if I'm honest, it is the wanting that keeps me from that particular sleep. As long as there is a chance, however thin, however impossible, that the border might thin again and let me see him — even for a moment, even only enough to watch him cross the meadow from a great enough distance that he'll never know I'm watching at all — I find I cannot quite let myself join the others in whatever stillness has finally claimed them.

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I wonder, sometimes, whether they were wiser than me. I wonder whether surrender is actually the gentler path, the one that lets a soul finally stop hurting itself over something it was never going to be given. I have wondered this for longer than I'd like to admit, and I have never once, not a single time, actually chosen it.