Free Eleanor by Jason Gurley Page A

between Mea’s world and the ones beyond is not glass, of course, but it is there all the same, a sort of fine membrane. It is firm enough to support her boundlessness if she rests herself against it. It reshapes itself to her form, like a hammock, like a glove. Mea finds this interesting, because she has no idea what her form is. She knows that she had one, once, but it no longer hems her in. Here in the darkness, Mea has no edges. She simply breathes the dark. The dark is a part of her. In a sense, she is the darkness.  
    She likes it. The darkness itself is older than anything, Mea has learned. It speaks to her without words, teaching her of its birth and the visions that it has witnessed over the eons. The darkness remembers when time started. Time is a river, and it flows in a circle. Time is a current in the darkness. The darkness is the great river of memory and being , and all things float within it. Every birth and death. Every sunset, every falling leaf. Every extinction event, and every tiny jostle of the atoms of a cloud.  
    Time is only one such current. There are many others, and Mea is still learning about them all.  
    Time is genuinely of no consequence to Mea. In the darkness, she can redirect it, as a child redirects a trickle of water in dirt. She can immerse herself in its steady pull, and swim upstream, visiting the memories that the darkness has collected over the millions and millions of years it has been here. She absorbs everything she can, feels the loves and ambitions of every living thing flow over her like water, feels them slip into her midst and become a part of her, as if she carries those memories herself now in veins she cannot see, through organs she no longer possesses.
    In the dark, Mea comes across a story that feels familiar to her. This startles her as much as she is capable of being startled, for Mea does not know her own origin. Mea simply is , as all the currents in this dark stream simply are , as all the changes of the seasons forever will be . So many stories seem the same to her—memories of a bird who falls from its nest and starves while its mother stares down at it; memories of a planet that forms from the dust of a long-dead star and flowers in the deepest, quietest night, then one day withers away, unnoticed by the universe; memories of a mountain that grows out of deep unrest, and rises powerfully into a violet sky, and is then overtaken by ice and snow until it is immobilized—and when she discovers this new story, it disturbs her.
    Mea is not accustomed to feeling such a thing. She feels as if her insides have been troubled, stirred up by a force she cannot identify. She discovers senses that have rested dormant for what feels like a thousand years. Longing rushes through her like a toxin. Despair forms itself into a hard bullet in her middle. Mea has lived like a cloud, like a vapor, for so long that when this story awakens her feelings , it is as if her feathery form has begun to solidify into rigid shapes. Mea begins to feel… restrained.  
    This is not right. It isn’t the way that Mea is supposed to feel. Mea isn’t supposed to feel at all. She is not expected to care about the stories, about the deep memories of existence that she swims about in. She is only expected to observe, to see.  
    In the darkness, Mea trembles, and stops fighting her way upstream. The darkness carries her as it carries all memories, and she tumbles in the blackness, wondering what is happening to her. She passes other memories, ones that she has already observed—memories of fragile beauty, for all life and being is fragile, memories of warm suns and symphonic stars and clouds and babies and oceans and fire. These memories occupy tiny voids within the darkness, their stories contained in tenuous little bubbles all their own, and as the stories come to their ends, the bubbles collapse, and the darkness rushes to fill them like water into so many perforations.
    This is how the