Sodality

     And is there nothing? Dark rollers breaking out of a moonless, cloud-choked night? Other romantic doggerel like that? Or is there a greenwood, an oasis, a Lubberland, a peach-tree blossom spring? No, you know you don't think so. What's untouchable, what's never been approached, is unlikely to look or to not look like any happy or unhappy story you've composed or entertained awake before.
     Shall we go, anyway? Try, anyway? It wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't that no one can go together. Death has more companionable aspects than the lived loss of memory dealt out in consciousness crushing hammer blows throughout any ordinary night's naughts of sleep.
     Worse, no good story goes alone. There is no story in it, not even for a castaway, not without contrived companions. The islands of the dark are large and uninhibited as to being uninhabited, and no bad or good drama goes on there among them.
    Yes, now you guess.
    All this preamble of "we" and "uncertainty," of "you" and "me," delivered as if we shared the same apprehension of a barely perceivable outline, of Aristotle's ship sinking hull-first into the horizon of a sea-girt world, into another we'd never really know up close, not us: fake. Forged fellow feeling. I forged it.
    Yes, you're correct. I've been there. I haven't only just reasoned or speculated wildly at my scholarly leisure in my study. I've been there. I can tell you. Yes, you're correct. I remember.
     No, no, I apologize. I lie. No awareness goes down unaware below the horizon, however alive, to return, however alive, with anything other than imaginations in hold. We are all visitors, you and I, all alike, and not one of us has ever arrived.