This entry is by onezero
Time is, and it isn’t.
It is, outside of us, where our lifebars predict two days until our birthday.
It isn’t, inside of us, where we feel the same now as always, resting in the still space between crickets’ chirps or settling into the buzz of the cicadas’ thrum or the stream of chatter of the one thousand and one, here and there and always, where space meets silence.
And so we throw a party to celebrate our choice to drink from the cup that lets the time that isn’t meet with the time that is so that we bring into form the still silence that is within us now.
With zest for life, even a silly, smiling man can find that inside of him is something timeless. Maybe it is in his goofy smile or maybe in his glutton’s girth.
Perhaps this is the last white cup I wash. The thousand tell me that soon it will all change, this landscape of structure. Some will move. Some will stay. I will be among those who stay here on this high point above the canyon, for it’s here that I feel that what is inside of me moves in sync with what is outside.
The silly man will stay, and so will Red, his daughter, my niece, who is more friend to me than family, which means, to me, that we are true family of the soul.
The one through whom the changes come, my grandniece, Cypress, her dance will lead to new lands where I will come as visitor, carrying home within me.
Sugar tells me that wherever our dances lead us, home will always be inside of us, and as I feel the shared space inside, I know that this is so.
We love this man who came to bring to us the one that lifts all rules.
“We’ll still have rules,” says J.P. “Existence needs structure and limit.”
“Things will still catch on fire,” he said, after the bar burned at the party’s end. “And we’ll still need to put the fire out. Ghosts will still return to their graves at dawn, the energy that forms our ones and zeros will still pulse. Just because we’re releasing one set of rules doesn’t mean we’ll live with no rules.”
Andy the Bear takes pictures of us all.
“It’s to remember these last days,” he says, “before the Bough diaspora.”
Jade greets change with less grace.
“I was hoping to be the family friend that came over every day,” he said.
“You can still come over every day,” Cypress told him.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’ll still be here, and so will Red and Nathanael, and maybe J.P., too.”
“It won’t be the same,” he said.
Change happens, and it doesn’t.
It happens on the outside.
New people join our family.
But inside, it’s the same love we feel. Sugar looks at Knox the way she looked at Tomas the way she looked at Chandler the way she looked at Nico.
There are places where the same patterns perform variations of the same moves.
And inside, we feel the same, only different.
Cathy Tea's SimLit Anthology 