I don’t arrive.
Arrival suggests an end, and I have never known how to end. I have crossed places you would call borders. Fences rattle and loosen at their joints as water dimples and splits around me. Everything responds.
I am always moving from one place to the next. Even now, as the blades of grass bend and press back against my weight, I cannot hold them. My touch slips, brief and ungrasping. The grass absorbs my passing but returns to itself.
The water is quite similar.
I push aggressively against it and the water accepts this, rings widening from my fists. But then as I move forward, it reverts to stillness.
It does not keep me.
It never does.
But you?
You sit at the edge of the water like a relic left there by the tide. The ground yields to you too easily. It slackens where you linger, darkens under your weight, as if it knows better than to resist. Your hands press into it with selfish desperation. You anchor yourself, hoping that if you press hard enough, you might become part of it.
But I have seen what follows. I have felt the slow sodden surrender. The soil parts, not in welcome, but in hunger. It opens the way a wound does. And still, you remain. You do not look down, refusing to see it.
You touch the ground because it remembers you better than you remember yourself. You are not remembered for your presence but as something that interfered with the natural order. Long after you leave, the ground stays altered. Hollow. A softness where there should have been resistance. A shape pressed into the world that no longer contains you. The earth does not forget.
You are not as still as you pretend.
I move closer.
Not rushing (I never rush).
For I am patient in ways that you are not. I have all the time you think you are running out of. I brush against your fingers, your skin answering before you do. A faint disturbance travels up your arm, subtly lifting the surface, as though something beneath it stirred and chose not to rise. I follow it, drawn to the quiet betrayal of your body. My hand drifts to expose the nape of your neck, feeling the warmth gathered there. Your reaction is only noticeable in the interruption of your breath. Your eyes remain concentrated on the other side of the water, but I see the ripple moving through you.
You recognise me. You always do.
I follow what you leave behind. I have lifted the dirt that clings to you and carried it with me. I have felt the shape of your body in a way the ground fails to. I have touched you more times than you could count. I always linger. But never for long.
Go.
I whisper against your skin, across your mouth, threading myself through your thoughts before they can fully form.
You don’t.
And yet, somehow, you do.
Your body fills with motion gradually, building like pressure with nowhere to escape. Your fingers spread into the dirt, pressing wide, searching for an anchor. Your arms straighten enough to lift your torso, measuring the pull against you. You hover. Not sitting, but not exactly standing.
You exist in the liminality.
When I move, I move entirely. There is no space between impulse and action. I am already gone the moment I begin.
But you—
You gather momentum only to strangle it. You begin as though seized by some private urgency, only to contain it before the movement can become real. You lean toward departure while your hands remain buried in the earth.
There is nothing still about you.
Watching you is like watching a flame burn beneath water: twisting violently against the pressure around it, surviving longer than it should. The fire consumes itself and everything around it to simply continue another second in the same impossible state.
I pass harder over the lake.
The surface fractures beneath me. Reflections split apart like cracked church glass, saints and branches warping together beneath the trembling water. Light scatters in broken halos that cannot keep their shape.
Moving now would mean coming apart. To loosen beyond the version of yourself you have spent too long trying to preserve. You are not as still as you pretend. I have watched it happen in smaller ways. Your thoughts dissolve before they can fully form, certainty softening the edges of your body as it leans towards things your mind immediately tries to deny. You reform yourself constantly. Again and again – unfixed, like the water beneath me.
I return to you, slower now. This is the closest I come to stillness: not stopping but stretching the moment thin enough to feel like it might hold.
I whisper against your lips (barely there, almost nothing), a touch you could dismiss, if you needed to. A kiss, if you didn’t.
You inhale sharply.
There —
that unbearable edge.
You lean forward, rising into the touch, for one suspended second. The tension holding you together loosens, and I carry you through the brief surrender. Or perhaps you carry yourself. Or perhaps there has never been a difference —
—but then again, you stop.
Again.
Always again.
I cannot stay any longer. The reeds bow after me in dark strokes, the lake shivering as I pass. Silver light breaks across the water in thin ruined lines. By the time your body returns to its “stillness”, I am already elsewhere. I am pulled through the trees and into the night beyond you.
Still, I leave carrying something of yours.
The loosened soil caught beneath your fingernails follows me into the dark beyond, carrying the evidence of how desperately you cling to things that cannot hold you.
