The Final Sorrow

There came an hour when the dark remembered itself.

It had worn the shape of a man for longer than it was meant to, had stood too near the hearth, had let the warmth persuade it that it belonged among the living. But the dark has always had a home elsewhere, deeper than the roots of mountains, further than the reach of any lamp.

No one wished to see it go. That is the way of things. We never wish to watch the evening give itself back to the earth, but the earth is patient and the earth is old, and what it has lent, it will reclaim.

So the dark gathered what it could carry of its own silence and turned toward the place where light has never been. It did not look back. The dark has no eyes for such things. It only moved, the way water moves when it remembers the sea, slow and sure and without complaint.

The room it left behind grew cold in the gentlest fashion, the way a chapel grows cold after the last prayer has been spoken and the congregation has passed through the door. Not empty, exactly. But hallowed by absence.

If you stand there long enough, you may hear something. Not a voice. Not a farewell. Only the sound of a shadow settling back into the soil, returning to the country from which it was briefly and unwillingly called.

Nobody asks the dark to speak before it goes. The dark was never meant for words.