"Tears"

This story was inspired by the photography of Rose-Lynn Fisher. Follow the story along with her images here.

(Tears of laughing until I'm crying) is an entropic quest. The connected lagoons in the Northeast do little to conceal their desire for abandon. While harmony was never the goal, vacant land replaces the once childish idea of inter-connectedness: are you laughing or are you crying?

(Tears of change) prove that there is no life around. Abandoned suburbs run rings 'round our fortress. Soon, every branch, ever tunnel we've created will be consume: only to be exhumed and proved that the only consequence is change.

(Tears of grief) is as desolate as you expect. I can't go on...

I'll go on.

(Onion tears) and I'm somehow transported, no longer in a vast wasteland; I've skipped the mountains, the plains, the deserts, and arrived in the rainforest, just as vast, but beautiful, that is to say, bounty-ful and animal-ful, were I not careful it'd be death-ful: how dreadful!

(Convergence of Wonders) allowed me to zoom out, to track my way from on high. There! A ridge: but still many more miles till we reach the river of consequence.

(Watering Eyes: a micro climate), make that two micro climates, with four eyelids disclosing these internal climates from the outside world. We've wandered for days, and you think the cracks on the outside of my eyes are bad? I guarantee nothing could be worse than what's cracking up inside me right this moment.

(Tears of timeless reunion): how futile do we deceive ourselves! When we believe all is lost, finally: an oasis. To rest, to forget our journey, as if we'd never walked a step, as if we never passed a second, as if we never winked an eye.

(Tears of ending and beginning) would but naturally be complex. Because this is where we recognize our respite is neither beginning or ending: these words are even less define than our perception of time.

(Tears for those who yearn for liberation): I cry these tears all too often.

(Tears of release), damn these tears of release, of ejection. I never wanted to be on this inelegant raft. Stop: who am I to blaspheme this structure. It is elegant, and I've realized how selfish my previous tears have been. The unliberated remain unliberated whereas I...no, I am not liberated: I am exiled.

(Tears of possibility and hope)? Who am I to deserve possibility? Who am I to deserve hope? The unliberated, the abandoned, the truly exiled are not so fortunate. It is for them that I truly weep.

(Tears of elation at a liminal moment) fall to my cheek as I look upon the landscape from my drifting mattress, this carcass of all that could have been and connect my consciousness with those without possibility, those without hope. The impossibility of their lives, their hopelessness will not surrender in vein.

(Tears of remembrance) are little different than (tears of timeless reunion).

You'll notice I never once shed a tear from the cold.