It was well after twilight and the night was heavy with the scent of loamy soil and impending rain. A full moon sat lazily in the sky, trying its hardest to shed as much light as possible, but the light was swallowed by the night nonetheless. Erik walked along the path from the inn, his footfalls heavy and rapid. He chastised himself for staying out so late and attempted to calm his nerves.

Sudd...

They say that dust is largely human detritus

A buildup of the wake of microscopic entropy

Trailing behind each one of us.

Regardless of decomposition, of further entropic breakdown

Some of these little pieces and some even smaller

Have surely settled into the places you’ve been-

Or have been borne up on the currents of the wind, fated to circle the earth until the sun explodes.

In both cases...

And where do I live, if I’m a soul?

Am I in my eyes, the doors to perception, my windows to the physical world?

Or in my heart which beats and bleeds and aches and is broken and swells with love?

Do I live I my throat or lungs? I mean I talk so damned much, and I always feel the most alive when I sing.

How about my hands? These fingers that have created and destroyed, these palms that have pet...

Within me there’s an ocean vast and deep, endless and cold and dark as the sky on an overcast night. I fear often that if I misstep, I might slip and plunge into its depths, that it might consume me, rendering me nothing but a soul drowned in my own well.

Curious that my body can contain its infinity, the ponderous swell of it, small as I am. But that’s just it- it’s always there, exerting press...

One day, 4.5 billion years ago, or so they think, the soup of the earth’s primordial oceans decided, with the right ingredients, to become life. It was so simple back then, a single cell, the grandmother of everyone and everything, the countless lives in their countless forms afterwards. Earth with a population of one.

Although, intellectually, I knew that _thought _and _feeling _and _knowing _i...

Author’s note: I took this prompt in a slightly different direction. Instead of the letter being written from the perspective of someone already living 100 years in the future, I wrote it from the perspective of someone who is about to go into cryogenic sleep for 100 years writing to her best friend. Since I changed the prompt around, I focused on different narrative elements than the ones suggest...

I was quiet, but I was not blind.

Always watching, eyes wide in observation.

Taking in as much as I could, hungrily, greedily.

Is it a crime to want the gift of knowledge untainted by my presence?

Reality is so much more real without the impulse to alter it with unimportant verbal clutter.

I was quiet, so most assumed I was unengaged, but I assure you,

I am deep in private conversation with t...