epistle from the ancient

From: Akalysahea Mnilzapienthey
To: Louzirrahe Ansbelczse

Lou -- Such dreams, such candor, such ego? I don't know. It may have been minutes or moments -- my understanding of the events that transpired that nahambe has been abrogated. The mental volume I currently obtain is but a fraction of its former glory, therefore I have been forced to hibernate for unnecessary aeons, when I would rather be interacting with the members of the polity, my family, and other assorted sentients that occupy the Szathe Archipelago. I have not forgotten the promises of our time together, but I am not the being I used to be. My curtailment leaves me with tatters and fragments of my former comprehension, and these are not enough to forge the sort of relationship we had previously. In my current dementia, I do not remember most of the ideas that we discussed, laughed about, cried about, et cetera.

I have remembered -- struggled and employed great effort to remember one explicit thing. I have written and rewritten it in many languages (Pfia, Moeglarr, Deldrimbehts) because the emotional memories it provokes appear to be part of my own life support system for my memories. I get little violet snarls and paisley snags every time I write it down, though I have lost much of the declarative understanding of its meaning. I maintain, though, that some kernel of the thing inside it may point you towards someone or something or events in parts beyond my current ken that may rekindle the sort of congress we obtained with so little effort so long ago. So here 'tis:

"Firstly and foremostly, and without regard for such complicated and artificial conditions and consignments to emotional perdition, and beyond the domain of the Utter, we resoundly remark and broadcast our notice, under the shallow pool of the bizarre, and transcribing the mundane karst which interrupts our journey, we make manifest our understanding that what we have sought and what we have seen is not possessed by any intrinsic contrition or emotional bivouacking, for it is not the nouns or our names or even who we are in some grand cosmic theatre that matters so much, because all of these things are dependent on conditions we were not responsible for the initialization or the maintenance thereof, therefore such endured experience is the mark, as it affects the arrangement of stress in our bodies and impinges on whatever preexisting belief systems that have left spidertracks in our souls, and such a mark, for it is numinous, shiny, possessed of a lyrical quality that we have never been able to obtain anywhere else. Should we fall, or the duration of our comprehension of such wonders be finite, we therefore resolve to not be so attached to the particulars, for it is the flavor and feel of the experience which is more important than any detestable ensconcement in our memories. That having been said...


Secondly, the bright frost of the aftertomorrow scars itself diagonally across the green fields, charged with the icy remembrances of our glee, interrupting photosynthesis in many a chloroplast, and favoring various cryobiologicals. Beset with contrition? Beset with ablution? Beset with dilution? Our vagaries were molting, the unclear surfaces and badly formed tissues of our previous epidermis were hardening, and then we burst forth from our chrysalises, reformed. Now we could fly, but briefly."

I know not what this means. I believe it makes sense to you know. You will find me a wrinkled, sclerotic thing now. Time has not been kind. My pfistic memories do not at the moment encompass the complexity of the events that transpired together with us as witnesses. But know you this: I remember the ocean. Do you?

--Akalysahea Mnilzapienthey (Fourth Cohta of Nmi, Arascyra)