The Observer Effect. November 24

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
But should the eye close — all sinks into gray.
— William Blake

I think this is my final entry.

Writing is becoming increasingly difficult — the letters blur, the paper loses its substance, even the fire in the stove no longer yields color, casting only a gray reflection upon the walls. It is becoming almost impossible. The ink no longer argues with the whiteness of the page; it rests upon it like a shadow upon a shadow. The very act of forming letters demands physical effort, as if I were scratching them into the surface of frozen mercury. Everything is bleeding together into a single, gray static — the paper, the flames in the stove, the world beyond the window.

If anyone ever finds these pages, let them know: I tried to remember. But memory, too, is fading.

Padma sits by the fire, huddled against Lyosha. Her eyes, once like two deep, dark lakes, are now merely two smudges of fog on a pale face. Lyosha hasn’t spoken in forty-eight hours. Silence has become his way of showing care. Silently, he feeds wood into the stove. Silently, he tucks the blanket around the girl. And silently, for the third time now, he rereads my grandfather’s book, tracing his finger along lines that, to me, crumbled into dust long ago. I no longer understand what he is searching for in there — the words are losing their meaning, the lines bleeding into a single, pale smear. I just don’t understand. Perhaps he knows the whole book by heart. Or perhaps what he seeks in those written words is not meaning, but merely a familiar ritual — the final proof that order once existed.

Not a single sound has drifted up from the village for a week. It has become something else entirely.

When we arrived here, what feels like an eternity ago, it rang with life. The sharp, almost painful blue of the sky. The screaming colors of prayer flags snapping in the wind — blue, white, red, green, yellow — each color a distinct note in a shared song. The air smelled of dung smoke, juniper, and yak butter. Life pulsed in every stone, in the deep wrinkles of the old people’s faces, in the chiming bells on the necks of the yaks.

I can barely remember what the faces of the people who lived here looked like. Sometimes I feel they never existed at all. Just the three of us, the stove, and this diary, which will soon vanish alongside me.

Now, the village is a charcoal sketch drafted on gray cardboard. The flags are just bleached scraps of cloth, the exact same tone as the sky. Sounds died first, as if years ago. Scents followed. Now, color is draining away. Only static remains. Not the howl of the wind, not the whisper of snow. Just the background static of an existence stripped of all its properties.

Lyosha is searching grandfather’s Triptych for an answer. But I think the text itself was the answer.

We have simply reached its final page.

November 1 →
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River