Micro-fiction 079 – Guardian Angel (Echoes series)

I look up into the stars with the gentle sounds of breathing next to me, so why does it make me feel so sad?

I

It is dark in this pre-Dawn, with distant light filtering through, mingling with the remaining stars as the mantle withdraws from the skies. I sit on an ancient wall, a perch that stares out across the valley and the verdant landscape emerging from the darkness. Next to me I feel the gentle sounds of breathing, a powerful rhythmic response to the ebbs and flows of invisible solar winds.

I feel her presence. It’s a warmth in the cool air, a suspension of the moment, a tiny disturbance in time, her time. The hairs on the back of my neck prick at my flesh, finding an echo in my bare arms, as a subtle breath strokes our fragile forms.

“Are you there?” I dare not look across. My cheeks become aware of tears that linger wilfully.

She brushes her arm against mine. I feel the soft warmth of her skin. It hauls vast emotions from me, buried deep in places I do not know exist.

Still I dare not look.

“Do not.” Another voice swells within and around me.

“But—“ I sigh, I feel compulsion within that voice. It seeks to undermine this moment of joy.

“That’s not how it is, my friend.” It seems more kind now, a murmur, it settles me a little, and I feel the presence by my side shift, leaning a soft shoulder against me.

“Dwell within that sensation.” And I do. The body seems to lean in a little more. It’s a subtle gesture, easily missed, but for the whispers of trust and hope that issue from its being, its stillness.

II

The dawn is upon us now, rolling through the clouds, harrying vast shadows through the valley, towards us, a gathering wash of colours that chases darkness into the corners of the new day, to and through us as we watch the unfurling of sunlight across the universe of our vision.

“Come, focus my friend.” The voice brings me back and as the light hinges up swiftly, I feel scared by the movement, as though a part of me is being pulled away.

I feel a pressure on my hand. It is familiar, a small weight restricting the freedom of my flesh. I realise it’s a hand, smooth-skinned, soft-fingered and reassuring. I press back, watching everything pulse with change.

“These are the moments my friend.” The voice slides around, distracting me for a little while, before I realise I am smiling. The warmth against my shoulder, the soft skin pressing on my arms, the hand amongst my own, these seem to seek paths within me, laying fresh landscapes of memory.

III

The bright light of day is high now, almost blinding with its intensity. If I had been tempted to look to my left before, I would not be able to see now, with the flare of hot sun in our eyes.

IV

I notice the hold on my hand is a little less strong, the lean against me, a little less steady, but now the paths have been laid within, perhaps that is no longer necessary. The layers of memory now have foundations which require less urgency.

“Is that true?” I speak aloud, but the words emerge as a shudder in the air.

V

The hand upon my own is not so soft now, it’s brittle even, like fine paper. It has become a little less yielding, as the shoulder against my own has turned from being gentle to fragile, and the arm against my own perhaps begins to fail. Once more, I feel scared, and look into the skies, to see the light begin to fall, pulling with it the long shadows that earlier had been banished to the edges of this world. I watch the wide skies darken, the darkness dragged across the valley as the cold sets in, and I feel the hard stone of the wall beneath me.

“Hold on, my friend, keep your focus, all is not yet done.”

I become aware of the ragged breathing next to me, no longer the confident pulse in concert with the lands and the skies, the stars and the distant winds. It snatches and halts, surging for long moments before falling back. I feel a longing for the old rhythms, and a sadness creeps around me.

VI

The shoulder upon my own now slumps against me; the hand is so light I can barely feel it. But still, strangely, the memory of the past sustains the sensation of longing, protection, of love as though it has separated from its origin, living on beyond the current state of the body beside me.

VII

And then, the hand crumbles within my own and my fingers are left sifting through dust. A breeze has swept up from the valley, freed from the glare of the light, and released by the shadows it swells up our wall to harvest the dusty remains of my companion.

I shake with grief.

I wail my sorrow through the valley and out to seas.

I rage at the dying embers of the day, with darkness returned, and the stars peering back down, disinterested in the fate of my companion.

“You have come so far my friend.”

“But what am I doing here? Why must I suffer so?”

“Because we are not human, at least, not in the way they are.”

“Oh! But this loss, this life, where has it gone?”

“It has not gone, it lives now within you, the memories, the sensations, the energy and warmth, the subtleties of emotion are inherited within you, for it takes a host of humans to make a single one of us.”

“Us? Make?”

“You are but a child, but to humankind you would be ancient. Their bodies experience time as a path, whereas we know only still moments built one on top of another, created from the memories and sensations of these human lives.”

I pause, and gaze at my own hands, now more defined than I had noticed before. Is it possible that what I know is but a series of other lives, preserved within me? Am I to be both a Guardian during a brief human life, and a museum of artefacts of that life, and so many before them? So we cannot experience our own life events, and the consequences of them.” No answer is returned from my rhetorical question. “We are created as vessels, awaiting the being of each humankind, and their relentless consumption of linear time, to become the repository of their lives lived, their emotions, motivations, motive spirit?”

“Indeed, the essence of humanity lives on within us.” The friendly voice, an older version of my own, completes my thought. “Our experience of time, being monolithic, is no time at all really, because for us, and the universe, there is no…