Along the west bank of a narrow muddy track there is a shimmering screen of cypress. He is facing it when he emerges from another lapse. His own footprints tell him the direction he has come, but he remembers nothing since the mossy, graying walls of Carpathia.
In his left hand is an irregular stone; one face jagged and new, the other smooth and decayed. Held before him in coincidence with the trees, he can liken the network of slender roots that were growing through it, and the unfixed streams of dusk coming through the leaves:
There are no walls, none that are impermeable barriers. The wind and the light come through; the earth digs its fingers in; even the body is not a wall. The skin is porous. All the things he has touched, sweat he has meted out in exchange for tears absorbed through fingertips, the lovers he has held, the dust of a millennium of civilization tramped down under his bare feet.
Everything gets in.
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