Dear Unknown Friend,
I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing to you from a place of unsung beginnings & unseen fountainheads. It stands like a fortress against the tides of time, ancient and indomitable, and every one of us will crumble to dust before it does. It seems fitting to return here to complete this work. We all keep returning here, like hungry ghosts in search of some hidden treasure.
And so I am here again. I trust that in your heart, you will understand the necessity of my return even if no one else will. People ask me why and I answer and paint various portraits of my purpose. All of them are true, but none sufficient alone.
I have spoken of reconnecting with my roots to acquaintances and relatives, and they smile wryly and say that I sound like an old man already. All except for one, who nodded in silence and soon enough returned with files and folders and maps and sprawling family trees and faded photographs of serious, hauntingly familiar faces with piercing eyes that carry a terrible gravity to them. “This is called anthill wisdom.” And with those words they were handed to me.
To the many birds of the air I have confessed my weakness, being blessed by a giddying sense of distance and a lightness of heart, and talked about the weariness bidding me to withdraw here more openly than one should ever speak to scavengers that stay and stare at you with hungry black eyes long after their gentler cousins have flown south.
To a little brook that I met upon my arrival I casually told that I came here to finally finish a piece of writing, and it told me about a man who also came here with similar intentions, full of words and laughter and he stayed and conversed with the babbling brook, but as winter came and as the brook froze, laughter and words left the man. At the height of summer, he came as a man of words and of the world and the next spring he left as a hermit and as a man of silence. But I am not afraid, having long been beckoned by mute underground streams.
To the heavenly bodies I have even dared to speak of a holy mystery. The stars flicker and rejoice for me, and I feel ashamed for some reason. The moon rolls its turgid eyes at me and looks at me with contempt, and I feel ashamed again, but in another manner, and I lash out in anger at the lifeless orb and immediately feel a great calm settling over me.
Early snowfall now covers the earth and adorns the disrobed trees. I inhale the unsullied lily-white solitude only broken by small criss-crossing tracks in the snow. A strange nostalgia has woven itself around me since my arrival, not of days once lived but of dreams once dreamt. All things so near and still so remote. All things lie almost within reach, but not really. Yesterday, I tried to pinpoint the secret island and the sacred mountain of my childhood, but no map seems to know them. For now, I am occupied with ensuring I have enough firewood and supplies for the coming winter, but soon I shall venture out and seek them.
As the trees envelop me in their wooden cocoon here, I will envelop this letter and imagine it being sent over red oceans of time, hurled across the vast terrestrial vortex, across the great abyss known to us as the Loneliness of the Ages. Let it flutter and echo through space like an ancestral bird-song — a bone-song of times long since gone — and may it one day swoop down on you like a sparrow onto the palm of an unwary augur.
Best wishes,
[a cipher]