The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

There was a day — though I did not know, then, that it was a day distinct from any other, only that something in the light felt different, brighter somehow, more insistent, carrying a quality I had never yet experienced in all the countless turnings toward it — when the certainty I had always carried without question finally began, faintly, imperceptibly, to falter.

I don't know how to explain what changed except to say that the light stopped coming in its ordinary rhythm. Not entirely. Not all at once. But the pattern I had trusted so completely, without ever needing to name my trust as trust, grew inconsistent in a way nothing in me had a framework for understanding. There were stretches of stillness that ran longer than any winter I remembered — and I remembered them now, finally, that small shift in me, I was beginning to remember things, to hold them against other things and recognize the difference — stretches that made something in me ache, though I had no word for aching yet, and no understanding of why my roots should feel anything besides the need for water and warmth.

There were arrivals of warmth that felt wrong somehow, too flat, too colorless, as though the light itself had changed its nature without changing its shape. The color of the light was different. The weight of it was different. It tasted different, though flowers do not taste light the way mouths taste things — I tasted it through my stem, through my petals, through the whole of my being that had, up until this point, known only one kind of light and now, for the first time, was beginning to recognize that variation existed. That things could change. That what had always been might not continue being the same forever.

I understand now, of course, that what I was living through wasn't a forest at all anymore, not by that point — that some vast unraveling had already carried me somewhere else entirely, the way Something unravels at its every edge into whatever waits beyond it, the way a tree dies and the wood begins the long process of becoming part of the earth it grew from. The flower I had been, rooted so long and so patiently in that dark, green, wordless world, had already died, in whatever sense a flower dies — not cut down, not torn from my earth, but simply reaching the natural end of a life that had already given everything it had to give. And I had woken into something new without any way of knowing the difference, without any way of recognizing that death had occurred, that transformation had happened, that I was now something other than what I had always been.

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I did not understand any of that, then. I only knew that the light I had waited for, faithfully, across every season I had ever lived, had stopped arriving the way it always had, and that I was, for the first time in the whole of my existence, uncertain. Doubt had been born in me. Fear had been born in me. The need to understand had been born in me.

I did not have a word for uncertain. I did not have a word for doubt, or fear, or the cold, new sensation of not-knowing. I only had the plain, wordless sensation of it — a small, cold seed of something that had never before had room to grow in me, planted now in the space where perfect faith had always, effortlessly, lived, pushing that faith aside, making room for itself, growing.

I stood — if standing is even the right word for what I did, rooted and still, in a place that no longer resembled any forest floor I had ever known, pale stone stretching flat and empty in every direction, a colorless grey sky holding steady overhead in a way no true sky ever had — and I waited, the only way I had ever known how to wait, for a light that no longer seemed to be coming.

It was there, in that particular unraveling stillness, tilted toward a horizon that offered nothing but grey, that I first heard footsteps that weren't my own. Slow footsteps. Uncertain footsteps. The footsteps of someone who had also walked for a very long time in silence, and who might, I was beginning to understand, know something about what it meant to wait for something that might never come.

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