passage

The marsh doesn't have any concept of before and after. There isn't anything so discrete as all that. Not here. Not in any way you can learn (maybe there's one you can't, but Kya Clark isn't one for supposing that sort of thing any more than she needs to to know it, to defend it).

Creatures make their marks on their mates so they can find 'em later, and so others can see that they've done so. So they can stay back. So they can keep close. Not for the thrill of doing it. Not for the purpose, but for the process.

The passage, of one day into the next. The sun's always rising, the moon's always setting. Or it's the other way around, but something's always moving over the marsh. The whole still bout of the air is full of it, teeming and tossing and turning, just as much as the water's full of those same creatures, biting and kicking and sleeping and waking.

All the time. All the time.

No before and after. Only today and tomorrow, and the passage in between.

And as the seasons pass, that time shifts around itself, with only the one-sided touchstone of the past as a guide. It has to keep going. It knows where and when to, but also doesn't. Eventually it comes back around to the beginning again, but it's changed. Oh, it's changed.

Like learning how to read. You don't just understand it all at once, how the shapes and lines can mean something at the slightest glance - mean something more when you look down in closer, too.

I didn't, anyway. I sat there for weeks, with Tate. Picked out the meanings with my fingertips. Didn't even realize I'd learned until I was reading, even though I knew I was trying, had been the whole time.

I knew what people got out of reading, because they'd told me (not much, but they'd told me). Quite a different thing to do it for yourself.

I'd like to think my first time would've been the same way, if it had been with him.

Slow, and sweet. Almost deliberate, but for the parts you can't think about because you're too busy doin' 'em. The part where the love comes in.

The part where the love leaves, too.

Sure, with Tate, if he hadn't left. But everyone always leaves. That's part of the passage.

They've got to go. That's for them. That's their newer, stranger phase. The moon still shines, even from behind the clouds.

And then...Chase was dead. No before. No after. He just was. He was always going to be. No sin. No tragedy. No proclamation to God or His preachers about the right and wrong of it all. He was just dead.

Humans are always dying. All animals are. From the very moment they're born. That's why life doesn't have any grand, pinned-up climax. Just the endpoints. That's where the getting over the hump bit happens. Everything else's just the mud stuffed in between.

And mud can be beautiful.

Mud can choke you, and kill you, and mire you down. But it's the same mud that keeps you walking slow, reveling in the glory of the marsh. It's the same mud that makes up the earth beneath our feet.

(Hard against the proud row, vertebrate spine's column, of knots along your back stripped bare, and I don't want to think about it but it chases me, I was different before and now it's after, now it's been done, I hate this newer, stranger phase.)

It's the same mud you get dragged through when people who don't understand the marsh try to make it about before and after, about change for change's sake instead of change for life's sake. No peace in that.

He didn't need to do that. Not for me.

Not before. Not after.

And now it's done.