Movement Eight — VII. Back to the Lake

I want to close, before I let you go, exactly where I opened — with the figure at the center of that black and patient water, decomposing into bone, drowning in memories this account never claimed to know the shape of.

He is still there, as far as I know. Still suffering. Still unnamed, in every account I've been able to gather, by anyone who might once have known him well enough to offer him one.

And still, the figure remains there.

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I don't know who he is. I don't know how he came to be there, or what he did, in whatever life came before this suffering, to earn a fate this patient and this total. Perhaps this is simply what the Between does, given enough time and enough abandoned, unguarded places — it produces suffering, and it produces the souls willing to cause it, over and over, in shapes that sometimes happen, by nothing more than coincidence, to rhyme.

I suppose someone, somewhere, knows who he was.

I hope, for his sake, that they remember him as something other than what the Between left behind.

— End of Interlude —