Called to the Black

Behind my closed eyes, I can see her standing there. There’s no trees, sky, no life around her.

There’s only us, facing each other, and the black. There’s no up or down, no direction. There’s nowhere to go.

She’s agitated. 

There’s too many fractures. They’re scattered around us on the ground so black I can only see the faint ripples emanating somehow from her silent feet. 

I watch her pick up handfuls of my shards from the ground at her feet, over and over while parts of me are still collapsing, turning in on themselves, tearing at their frayed edges before joining the growing heaps. 

She’s angry. She turns to me with black eyes, sunken into shadowed pits. 

She looks like she’s screaming, but there’s no sound here in this place that defies physics. I feel her thoughts scraping inside my mind: “This isn’t the way!” 

I want to scream back: “Then show me!”, but my voice is stuck; the stone won’t unfold. 

Her arms are overflowing with shards.  

Slowly, the fragments are losing all colour, fading to translucence with no shimmer or shine. Some are biting into her body, but where blood would flow, instead there’s only a faint light peering through porcelain cracks.

There’s a rattling from my clenched fists.

She’s not seeing me anymore. 

“You’re halfway there.”, she whispers quietly. 

She stares through me.

“Finish what you started. Finish your descent.”

I stare down at my hands. My fingers uncurl, thoughtlessly, as if my will acts on its own while keeping secrets from my mind.

“Finish it.”

Twisting. Opening.

“It’s your turn. It’s only fair.”

I know she’s right. It’s time to yield to the great fall.

She’s finally calming, as I swallow again and again. Each gulp twitches her thin lips closer to a smile.

There’s no clatter when I drop them — they simply cease to exist. Without fail, the great black swallows everything that’s finished, always, with no fanfare.

As the last of me crumbles into flakes of past hope and dust of past efforts, she dissolves with me, back into everything and nothing, and we both finally rest.

February 13 – 15, 2026