Memory of Water

The fabric of reality rearranged itself around me in a way from which I could not avert my gaze. Threads of life wove their way across and around each other, they intertwined and grew apart again, forming a web that held existence together. I could see the cracks in it clearly, the strands coming loose and slipping away from me. The world still grew and throbbed with stories, but I no longer had a foothold in them.

And behind it all was a void I could almost touch now: a cold space of silence and nothingness, a place we reach when we vanish from the memory of the world.

The place where we truly die.

I wanted to turn away, but I was held still by the chain of events that had brought me here, the past that lay behind me set in stone and would never give in, never break, never shift its shape. I would be looking towards it until I would no longer be looking at anything at all. Stories about it might bend this way and that, but the truth behind them could not be transformed. It bowed to no power but its own.

‘A circle only knows its own shape. If you ask where it begins and where it ends, it will stay silent, yet unbroken.’

Wei Wulong, ‘The Path of Tea’

7th century of Old Qian time

That night it rained, rained until the dust of the earth foamed mud-dark, and narrow brooks ran across stones and yards and withered tree-trunks. People opened their mouths and drank directly from the sky and thanked nameless powers. Water rattled into buckets and tubs and onto roofs, and its sounds enclosed the landscape within their soft fingers, stroking the soil and grass and tree roots.