The Distant Places

We keep to the places they struggle to explore: the mountaintops, the deep oceans, Alaska. The lore helps us: should a lonely mountain man see a vision on the Denali slopes, who will believe his tall tale to be true?

We were never social creatures; we never traveled in packs, built cities, protected the family unit. At the beginning, we remember watching the hairless apes band together with fond bewilderment. We should have foreseen: cannot a colony of ants bring down a great spider, or termites topple a house?

It's strange that here, in our collective twilight, we have found some measure of that pull of life to life. On mountaintops, in deep oceans, and in Alaska, we find each other: an encounter that is almost accidental in its fateful simplicity. Like snowy tigers coming upon one another on the border of their territory, we meet, touch noses, and go on our way.

It takes some time for us to move from place to place. Our plasmatic tails and fins and jawbones were built for contemplation, not velocity. It can be hard to see us, translucent and nearly incorporeal against the snow or in the deepest places, but nevertheless our speed is a danger. Like the soap bubbles some of us say we resemble, we were built to drift.

We found another in a copse of trees whose boughs had been scorched and felled by fire. Like so many matchsticks, the trunks protruded upright from the hard earth. We found ourself there with little intention; the pull was quiet but insistent. They were already in the trees by the time we moved our enormity up one craggy hill and down another. A light snow was falling, and perfect flakes settled on our back. There preserved, they seemed to hover, and didn't melt.

It had been quite some time since we had seen another. There are fewer and fewer of us now, and our proclivity to vast deserted spaces does not lend itself to chance encounters. But here they were, an outline in the snow. We are not impatient, and they did not stir as we continued to process to meet them.

In the matchstick wood, they and we exchanged words: ventriloquist, we offered, adorbs, and beatemest. In return, they brought us silviculture, weeb, and barbacoa. It is a great pleasure to enjoy words with someone who, like us, feels no need to rush. We enjoy slowly.

They asked about our journey here.

Long, we replied, And full of snow. We traveled on the mountain's edge.

It's a journey full of loveliness, they said.

And you?

We have been here with these bare trees for a little while, they said. It's winter, so they do not bloom.

We have been around for quite some time: before many creatures had left the seas, we were born. But they are older even than we are, older than the atmosphere and maybe even older than this world.

Touch, like socializing, is not something that was ever typical of our kind -- we are only one step away from the wholly cerebral. Even so, we and they reach out and brush the filaments of each other's casings. We, as a species, do not feel very many things: cold and heat and pain and water are distant sensations that we consider only as an interesting idea. This feeling is not an overwhelming one -- but neither is it just an interesting idea. Our skins in contact, we contemplate for one another, and separate. They remain in their forest of matchstick trees, and I slowly move up the slope again and out of sight.

In times before, a new one could have slumbered in our meeting, and risen themself to join the slow and distant throng. But we do not multiply anymore; it is the hour of our decline, and so we find each other for a brief hello before we both must sleep.