I stopped myself somewhere upon the lonely plain and turned to look behind me, and there was the line of statues all frozen in what they had been doing at the particular time when the scissors of the Fates came to sever my past from my present and locked everything in, complete and immutable. They stood silent for my inspection. That one was the car accident, for instance; that one was the moment she gave her rejection, that one was the call from the hospice, and that one there… well.

Being at a pausing point in my work at present, I walked back, picking out one of them. He also had been in the middle of something. Evidence lay all around him with haphazard tools scattered about, sketches from work on something of importance, something that spoke deep within his heart… but I remembered, he had then set it down. This statue captured that exact moment when it all got too overwhelming for him, everything that had been going on seemed so monumental and pressed him down so hard he had to drop it all in shame and fear and guilt… all of this captured in one moment in time.

We were in a curious situation, he could speak forward to me through his notes and my memories, but I could never speak backwards to him; as loud as I might shout, as perduring might be the words I would issue, they could not flow back to reach him; the ten years I had lived since I had been him were as an impenetrable wall. Even so, I assembled within myself the things that I wanted to say to him. I wished I could hug him so he could feel it, I wish that from my advanced perspective I could arrange his tools to ease his burden, but I knew that all he had to work with was what was here. And would it have truly helped him? I no longer knew all that he had been thinking, the only way for him to speak forward to me was the imperfect instrument of my memory and the scattered bits and tools from the time when I stepped away from that past moment and was no longer him.

I knelt to examine the things he had worked upon, they were tiny sculptures arranged within a tiny stage. I found that I could take up the stage and stretch it, and move its point of view. I could take the little sculptures and twist them, make them larger or smaller and flip them, but I could not further distort them; each time I tried they would break to intangible shards and so I quickly stopped that. Instead I tried variations, arranging what he had laid down in different patterns, searching for the ones I found most pleasing, the same work he had been doing, his passion at the time when he had found the going too hard and had thrown it all aside.


I flexed them gently and the puppet figures danced. They had been telling a story in their own way, and they responded to my intent as I tugged at them and rotated them, little dark shards that danced for me.


There was a power there, I knew that I could once more make it my own.

I took up the little stage and its figures and carried them with me, back to the present, and as I stepped forward from there I heard behind me a sharp crackle and a sudden scent of rain-tinged air. I looked back again and saw that another statue was now added just behind me, of my older self clutching those small figures so full of potential and looking resolute, ready to do what was necessary this time. 

I smiled and returned to the whirl of my future days, solidifying around me like stone.