“Greet me like you used to,” I say to the moon, “back
when we used to hide together in closeness at night under the forest canopy.” I know he hears me, but he does not
answer. Something else hears me as well,
other creatures in the woods. They are
not the summer creatures, those of flesh and blood and simple need. They are darker, their need deeper.
It is a bright moon and I can see the path quite clearly,
so I leave the woods and take the road made by man instead. I do not often take man’s path because he is
treacherous, but just now it seems the lesser of two evils. So I continue on December’s path, wondering
if it is a nighttime mirage that causes me to think there is a man in the road up
ahead, walking at a steady gait toward me.
Presently, though, I realize that he is corporal, of the flesh. Instinctively I reach for the alabaster
scabbard, protecting the tiny candle within, which I guard like my life.
Now we are across from one another, he on one side of the
road and me on the other, and even though there is no barrier between us, we
behave as if there is. We stop and stare
across at each other.
“What is it, girl?” he growls at me.
“What is it yourself,” I respond, attempting to sound
much braver than I am.
He is an old man, and his face is deeply lined, each line
having a lifetime story to tell. But old
or not, he still seems as hard as steel to me.
My hand tightens on the alabaster scabbard. I do not think he likes me.
“If you think you are stronger than me, then come across,”
he says as he crosses his arms over his chest.
“That is unfair,” I return, “because my burden is very
heavy.”
“And mine is not?”
He turns slightly to reveal a tremendous pack on his back.
“I cannot carry mine much longer,” I say, but he scoffs
at me.
“Pick it up and shoulder it. If you are damaged, it is because you are
weak.”
I look in the direction from which he has come, the very
direction in which I am heading.
“Why are you leaving?” I ask, and this makes him falter a
bit.
“Because the thing I feared has come upon me,” he says.
“Why?”
“Because I feared it.
I feared it and that fed and fanned the flames. And now what I dreaded has come to pass.”
I wonder if he is simply afraid because he is old, and he
smiles as if reading my thoughts.
“Look around well, sweetheart. I am the oldest man you will meet. I am older than the King,” he says. Then he adjusts the pack on his back, a grim
and determined look on his face, and he continues to walk. Without stopping, over his shoulder he says
as an afterthought, “And so he put her in a shell, and there he kept her very
well….”
Then the cold night swallows him up, and I cannot see him
anymore. The path before me is empty and
cold, and now I wish he were back. I
have more questions about what is ahead and what I might expect and what it was
that he feared. But it is too late now
to ask.
December is swallowing me up. I am coming to the end of this old year. What about the promise the Sun made? When He said he would always love me? Where is He now? And what about the promise that I made?
“Will you trust me?” I had said. To
him.
The burden grows tangibly heavier as I think and walk. The Cold Moon is climbing in the sky. The “nothings” it whispers to me now are
exquisitely empty. What wisdom the old
mathematicians must have had to have understood first substance, and then zero,
and then less than.
