lack thereof

The roadside -- crickets, a chorus of frogs, and the wind's fitful murmuring. It all blends together for deaf ears in passing. See now, the flicker of the gas-station lights, a fluorescent siren song that gathers dead insects like drowned sailors. No surly stranger mans the register. The store stays open.

The rustling of evergreens muffles the sound of nothing at all. Wilderness blankets it for miles, comforting. It is a backdrop to everything that cannot be heard.

A midnight breeze carries voices caught in the wind, trapped as shards of fragmented memory. The words distort with repetition, torn from context; the message in the bottle, soaked and broken, is stolen by the current.

You could die here on the roadside. You could lay down, let it take you. Flesh becomes earth becomes flesh again, the gas station green with moss, the dead-eyed windows telling their obituaries in splintering glass amid the blooming weeds. What lives and belongs will grow thick and many, until the earth is choked in green under the moonless sky, your ribcage-trellis fostering a dozen infant springs before the soil of your body buries you at last amid the rot and twisting worms.

The world will turn and turn and turn, into nothing. Life will carry on and overtake and burn; perpetual, it will do so with or without you. Unique as snowflakes, bodies lose their distinction in death. An ocean cares nothing for the shape of the snow that melts to feed it.

There are already more bodies here than you could ever hope to imagine. It is only by the size of yours that it will mean anything at all; even then, it could easily be another. This road sees few travelers, but all carry the same burdens.

A choice. Pointless, but it's yours. The road and the mountain won't begrudge you. They are patient, these miles of open arms and waiting mulch. A few years yet won't kill them.

Let the engine turn over, once, twice. The gas station lights are still humming. You'll welcome it, one day, when your eyes burn low as guttering candles do, waiting for the next gust of wind too strong.

The gas meter lingers, low. Driving home wasn't part of the plan.

The murmur of the earth follows you all the way down.