There was a place for her once. There was a city and a home and an address there. Friends and loved ones grew their roots together with her.
Even now the crowd unconsciously parts as though making space for her to walk among them.
A life gone sour. The wrong gods prayed to, perhaps, or the wrong urges nurtured.
She’d have claimed it was the world that was wrong, and she was hell-bent on fixing it.
She chose not to understand that none of that was for her to decide.
The world is bigger than that. It is filled with the weight of too many other minds. The inertia of its certainty is simply too much for anyone to shift.
She fancied herself the unstoppable force, however, and perhaps she was right.
It takes more than being right, sadly. When she collided with her enemy, what happened was the only thing that could.
She deflected. Out and away from Here and Now and Ever Was.
All that remains of her is one long scream smeared across the timeline, the boring of a worm through the dirt, a hole that someone surely passed through, but who? They barely notice the silhouette of her life in the negative space of their memories, but I do.
Throughout my life I felt her scream building, a pressure more than a sound, a knot behind and above my head, an intensifying tautness straining at my senses, years and years of it bleeding into the periphery of my awareness until now, when it consumes me utterly.
It rises to a crescendo. It’s almost the moment when she did this to herself and to me.
I am compelled to trace her steps, like an echo or a ripple she left in the pond, following the absence that once led a life here.
Whatever she did to me, whatever she will do to us, I have to see it through.