We were wiped out, so it says. However, as a people we didn’t die slowly, for in a short span of time we were gone from the region we’d known as home, where we settled after originating from the sea. We left our impression on the ones who survived by intermarrying with and conveying our survival expertise to the interlopers, those who are now our descendants. It would appear that we gave them everything, only to be extinguished a moment later, but that is only how they would retell it. History is a make-believe, whereas what is present is simply the furthest onward reaches of the past. What we did is what we knew to do unapologetically, remain open to everyday and anything that is seen coming off the horizon toward us, and to welcome it into ourselves as ourselves, and to enrich ourselves and it in a culmination that would move forward and onward. Those who arrived were us, and though they saw things otherwise, we held them in neither higher nor lower esteem, for they were equal and equivalent. When we started dying, and when we started losing, and when we started fracturing, and when our land started changing, we were part of that evolution, and were giving ourselves over to change and regeneration. The facts of our decimation are to be seen in the context of our willfulness, and in so doing, we preside over the region even now with greater power and presence than those who see death as an end. They do end, more so than necessary. But we preside, now as then, only less visibly. And those who came and were tasked with the damnable mission of settlement or conquest but shipped off absent the requisite spiritual humor were sentenced to something unenviable. They arrived and sweated and entrenched and labored and fought and worked and built and died and most of them saw it all pass in a breath, and they were furious with impatience and galloped at full speed toward all their goals, amassing wealth and power and prestige and land, creation underfoot, baptizing themselves with it all and hating death and being driven wild with rage and wrath at the fleeting puzzlement of it all, cutting at themselves in hopes of inciting a response from their gods, bleeding from their wounds into the ground underfoot and not perceiving the way the ground soaked them up with a fearsome thirst, until the end when they see death rising over the horizon against them, sailing quickly to conquer them, to resettle their souls in a distant place which they would find unfamiliar and terrifying, but which is unavoidable. But we knew all this, and had breathed all this from the beginning, and knew the way it worked, and saw things in less stringent terms, and so survived, and still do, and still watch and enjoy and execute a measure of influence which passes through the layer that differentiates the quick from the dead, like a heavy rope you swing mightily at one end and watch the wave rise against the ground and move toward the other end in a diminishing wave, so at my death, at the death of my people, I set off a momentous and energetic wave, seeing it diminish over time and fall off in some as it spread through our lineage, but like all things it never died completely, but maintained a ripple that advanced and is advancing, and which in its lessening has become a small and nearly indeterminable frequency, vibrating soft and deft in the present world, physical, dynamic, alive, yet mine and others’, as we abide and enjoy and deliver and most certainly watch, eternally, from on high.
XOXO