What the Ground Said

I asked the ground what it remembered of me from the years before I learned to stand upright.

It held the silence too long, as if sorting through its archives for a version of me long forgotten.

*

You were a pressure-mark first, it finally said.

A thin but measured insistence against older structures. For a fortnight, we mistook you for erosion until you began to move.

*

I told it I came seeking guidance. How to root and to rise. How to survive a world that persisted under ever-shifting ceilings and threadbare skies.

*

Roots don’t survive through poreless devotion, the ground replied.

They survive by separating what is safe to cling to from what must be abandoned without grieving.

*

I asked what waits below the remembered histories, the fossils, and all the quiet wars of minerals.

Only clay-like hunger wearing the mask of patience and loamy thresholds that open demurely inward before erupting violently upward.

*

I confessed that I feared losing myself if I burrowed any deeper, that the iron-rich underrealm might take more than it returns.

All ascents require a sacrifice, it told me. Your shape will not survive intact, but your mirror-bright sense of direction will.

*

I asked for a final instruction. If I rise again, who will I be?

Whatever fractures at the sound of your wooden name, it said. Whatever the light cannot refuse.