Amber Arquilla
She is walking across the shores, barefoot and smiling. Her hair is smooth, long brown strands tossing across her shoulders and rising up with my winds. She walks close to my shores, stepping on wet, compacted sand, letting the traces of my waves lap at her feet. She smiles, gazing at my horizon, my sun, my stars. I wish I could smile back.
She has been walking my shores, my forests, my mountains, for so long now. Millennia upon millennia, both of us watching the rivers of civilization run their course. First, came man, with their primitive and destructive technologies. Man hurt me, and I hurt them. Then, came their creations, the metal ones. They were kinder to me, but separate. The nerves of my roots could not breach through their metal skin, no matter how often I longed for their touch. Finally, man came again, but different. Unnatural, even for them, disconnected by their surgeons and scalpals, they were no longer of me. But she still was. She still lives, all these millennia later, a woman, frozen in her youth walking my shores and trekking my mountains. She’s seen so much of me, the beautiful sights in those lazy days, the closed-off and tight caves where she stayed safe, the wide-sweeping and vibrant coral reefs she explored, and the ripe orchards she harvested. Yet here, right here is my favorite view:
She’s wearing a sundress, plain and white, sewn by her own hands. She lets her hair whip in my winds, unbound from the plain golden circlet she usually held it in. Her bare, soft feet sink into my sand. They feel tired, calloused.
She has that same wistful grin across her face, looking at a lover you’ll never know. I feel guilty when I see that face. She is lonely, nobody to hug, to hold, to love in the way her kind always had. All she has…is me.
I’ve always loved her sundresses.
I walk across the shores, barefoot and grinning at her golden and painted eye. It’s beautiful, up there in the sky, setting ‘round the horizon. How long has it been since I called that the sun? It’s funny, it’s been her eye, her gaze, for so, so long. I can’t even remember the last time I thought of it as anything different, anything beside the warm light of a lover’s eyes. I wonder how many she’s had, in her infinite life? How many wanderers, across her warm and frigid earth, walking for their short centuries, trying to feel all of her stone, hold all her creatures, yet ultimately unable too. I wonder how many saw her other hands, her other bodies, her other eyes. So many forms of her, across this vast and nascent universe.
The first, of course, was the body I live upon. The body of small mountains and deep oceans, of green shrubbery and pale deserts. This has always, will always be my favorite version of her. I can’t quite explain why, maybe it’s nostalgia, or mortal affection. Maybe I’ve always appreciated the dulcet tones, over the burning reds and glowing greens. I’ve seen thousands of them, thousands of planets that spun around even more stars. I’ve seen worlds of magma, an ever-growing furnace that did nothing but burn and cool with the seasons of time, centered around cores of azure diamond. I’ve seen worlds of energy, surfaces of forever-reacting uranium, their reactions bordering on the power of stars, cores of boron stabilizating them, keeping them from achieving the height of glowing elegance. I’ve seen worlds of death, with winds of razor-sharp glass and surfaces of carved obsidian. Yet among everything I’ve seen, I cannot help but love the first above them. The first, and…something else. A place that cannot be called a planet, nor a star. It was so, so much more.
It’s been a couple centuries, I’m not sure how many, since I last looked into her true eye. I don’t think I could forget it, no matter how long I lived. At first, there was only darkness around her gaze, gravity wrapping and warping an aura of light, outlining the circle of your iris. As I fell inwards, it should have changed me, twisted me, torn me limb from limb. But it didn’t. It couldn’t. It was you, after all, and you would never hurt me. You held me, in your gravitational pull, thousands upon thousands of hands that held every one of my atoms like they were the most delicate of petals. I fell into you for…i can’t quite say how long. Maybe it was minutes. Maybe it was decades. Who am I, to measure the pass of your time, the clock-ticks of your universe? Who was I, back then, to see the beauty of your true gaze, when I finally reached its center? The eye that shone like a supernova, nerves made of stardust, centered around an impossiblity. A hole in the middle of the world. Yet it was not a hole, it was another place. And yet…it was a hole, a hole and a place simultaneously, a fractal of two things in one, like a staircase that goes nowhere, a road that goes everywhere. It was an overflowing canvas, colors so bright, yet mixing together until they meld into a miasma of grayish-brown nothingness. And it was blank. A void, removed of any substance, any color, even white. But, above everything else, all the colors and voids and space and time, it was…lonely. Tired. I reached out, to touch it, to touch you…
And I was home again, home in that little mud-speckled cave, laying on a hand-sewn rug, leaning against your rocky, plant-coated body. I felt your moss unwrap me, opening the arms of your embrace.
Even today, I can’t quite grasp what happened, when I touched you. I’ve tried to remember a thousand times, and yet it seems just out of my reach, leaving me with nothing but blinks of motion, heat, energy. There was one image, I can recall. It is
flashing and blurry, like I was not meant to see it. It’s of a pitch-black silhouette, ringed in golden light, in the shape of a beautiful woman.
I can’t help but wonder what that body feels like. I…I wish I could hold it, like you hold me. Wrap my arms around your body and squeeze, make sure you feel my presence like I feel yours. But I can’t, not really. It’d be like an ant trying to hug a giant, all you’ll ever feel is the slightest tingle of a touch. You’ll never feel any love, any affection, no matter how much you give away. I…don’t know how to live with that.
I guess I’ll live anyway.