I was a passenger in a dying memory, ghosting a consciousness that was already a ghost to itself.
A slap of cold salt wind caught my face the moment I stepped clear of the broken lighthouse. It was a small miracle it hadn't collapsed into the surf already, but I had no time to dwell on it; I needed to determine where this host body intended to take me. Already it moved.
If there was a baseline purpose for my existing here the environment wasn't giving it up easily. To my right, the path split - one branch tracing the dark shoreline, the other trailing upward along a low, crumbling cliff. My eyes bypassed them both, drawn instead to the massive hill anchoring the distance, its peak nearly swallowed by low, heavy clouds. A red light pulses slowly from the summit: a sickly, rhythmic blink matching the bruised heave of the sky.
"Up, then," I muttered to the landscape, the choice of path effectively made for me by the compulsion of this body - our body, now that I was here too - to reach that light. The beach below is choked with trash washed up on shore - the scattered, anonymous debris of a world that feels entirely hollowed out. There is no one else here. The mind native to this body perceived nothing beyond the weather-beaten heather and the cries of tired seagulls and that blinking radio tower light.
We are a visitor here, an anomaly as temporary and frayed as the rotting lighthouse we left behind, step by aching step.
Before long a sharp ache blossomed in my calves as the path climbed the shallow cliffside. Whoever this body belonged to was not accustomed to exertion in life, yet a frantic, unvoiced urgency drove them forward. It was a desperate momentum that their fractured mind was not quite whole enough to articulate.
amandla
theartofmadeline
titsay
2087
ellievsbear
