[6] Letter: The Reemergence

Root Tongue Dust Letters

This is the continuation of the last post in the series that you might want to read first if you haven’t yet …

---

Letter: The Reemergence

(Written with water and charcoal on the inside of a birch skin. Some smudging. Folded into thirds, as if to resemble wings.)

pdp1447ct24 - 14 x 11 inches - ink over paper on canvas - Cecil Touchon

I returned slowly.

Not like waking from sleep, but more like surfacing from deep water - an ascent through pressure and gravity. Something in me resisted. Not out of fear, but from the profound belonging I was being forced to leave behind.

My senses began to widen again. The texture of scale receded. The vastness of soil collapsed into dirt. The fragrant sentences dissolved into air.

When I opened my eyes, I was face-down in the forest, cheek pressed to a bed of pine needles. The ant was gone. The wing, too.

But something had changed. And not in the world.

The trees were the same. The sky unbroken. Birds made their ordinary music. Yet everything was steeped in a new kind of clarity - as if the surface of things had grown translucent. I could see unmistakably what they were rooted in now.

I sat up slowly. My limbs felt stretched. Not tired, just… rewoven. As if they'd been unraveled and stitched back together again, with fewer knots. I breathed and tasted the silence still clinging to the back of my throat.

The question that had always followed me - Who am I? - now felt irrelevant. Not answered. Just a recognition that the question was misplaced. Like a tool outgrown, left behind in a tunnel of memory.

I walked for a long time without direction. The forest opened and closed around me, alive in a way that I can’t describe. I could feel it watching now, gently and I with the same attention I had once reserved only for sacred things.

I came upon a stream and knelt to drink. My reflection blinked up at me - same face, same weariness in the eyes - but beneath it, a second face: softer, antennaed, glittering with grains of soil and longing.

It faded when I moved. Eventually the forest darkened and I laid down and slept deeply.

I returned to the village the next day. No one noticed anything strange. One asked if I had gone out gathering herbs. Another remarked on the quiet. I answered neither. I only smiled.

I sat with them. Ate bread – tasting it with relish, feeling the texture of it in my mouth. The crunch of the crust, the softness of the interior. Listened to their worries and weather-talk.

But the rhythm of my listening had changed. I could now hear what went unsaid - the silences between words, the old sorrows folded into gestures, the wings of grief being carried behind casual phrases. I could hear the labor beneath the language. I could feel their minds as they shaped their thoughts into words.

That night, I lay on my mat and felt the tunnels inside me. The chambers. The ancient map of scent and memory. I felt the hive of my own body.

And I realized something else had shifted.

I no longer wanted to be heard.

Only felt.

Only joined.

I write this now to mark the moment. Like an ant placing one scent-stone at the edge of a path, saying only:

I was here.
I went in.
I came back.
Carry something if you go.
And leave something behind.

- Still Listening
under the same moon