It’s been far too quiet, and yet in this new, immense stillness, everything continues to grow smaller and smaller. It’s warmer than it was a year ago, warmer than it was when I took my first steps, and yet the rain keeps falling. The sun has set far beyond the pines, sinking beneath the mountains and the vast, rolling hills of shrubs; behind me, unseen, (for right now,) is the very ground I stand on. She can’t see what I can, from where she sits, for I stand on the threshold of the dark and silent world outside. The door is wide open, the only barrier between the suffocating terror of the world beyond the doorway and the deserved, long-sought tenderness I have searched for - and yet I cannot close it.

Death is in the pines beyond. I cannot see it, its silent form unknowable and invisible to me - in fact, to all who contemplate it - and yet I am acutely aware that it is there. I so desperately want to turn away from the darkness before me, to fall into the waiting embrace of my love; it pains me, burns up within me, drives sharpened knives into every fiber of my immeasurably small being, to leave such a desire unfulfilled.

Every day it feels the shapeless death beyond me grows in strength, grows in size, and yet somehow grows less and less defined. I can taste in on the wind, feel it down roads and in the tightest spaces where I spend my days, working towards a goal equally formless, equally invisible. Never do I come an inch closer to understanding it, never do I come an inch closer to the space beyond my tiny, safe threshold, where the wind doesn’t feel quite as biting.

“Darling,” she says, placing a soft hand upon my shoulder and wrapping the other around my waist. Every touch is like a warm shower of relief, taking the pain away in seconds - however temporary it may be. “Please, come to bed. You’ve done no good staring at what you can’t see.”

I nod. She’s right, I understand - but I cannot close the door. For all my efforts, for all my recovery since that fateful night where my sister and I sat beside our mother on the couch, surrounded by family, for with all the strength I pull upon it - it will not close.

“I’ll be there shortly, love,” I say. I turn to place a hand and stroke her hair as I look into her soft, warm eyes. The cat rubs itself along my leg, purring softly and weaving itself between us. “It’ll only be a moment.”

She removes her hands, the cat slinking away with her as she returns to the bedroom. It’s safe, there, wrapped in the blankets with my guardian angel, my fravashi of worldly skin and worldly bone. With her, time slows. The shapeless mass beyond turns to a crawl, if only for a moment.

But it does not stop moving.

And I continue to stare off into the black, silent night. It’s warmer than it was, so long ago. When Cyrus proclaimed himself an actor of Marduk. When the people of Catal Huyuk lived and played as one. When men and women crossed cool waters, searching for meaning in a large and uncertain world, blooming with life and with mystery. When in the spirit of peace, of understanding, men left our cradle earth for the first time and looked down from above on our little blue marble.

I notice how long it’d been since I’d seen the bats. In the silent pines, on this warm, wet night, a twig snaps - and I see nothing.

“Prepare to meet thy God,” a voice says. It’s impossible to know from where, from whom, it speaks - and yet it echoes in my mind with each and every second as I stare into that invisible darkness. One day, one night much like this, the shapeless, invisible death will come out of the forest. I cannot close the door, cannot prevent it from laying an unseen touch upon the angel beckoning me to rest.

I stand for a moment longer, the abrupt sound of the twig suffocated into nothing by the deadly silence.

Wordlessly, I prepare to meet thy God, though I know not when it will reveal itself to me.