Hi I'm back! So haha how did that posting weekly updates thing turn out for you, you ask. Uh, not so well, but there will be another update real soon! When exactly will that be, you ask. Time is an illusion, next question. Anyway I hope you enjoy the chapter!

So often our brain doesn't choose what it reads. Have you ever really sat staring at a book, your eyes focused on the page, purposefully not reading even a single word, a single letter? It's more difficult than it probably should be. And another thing: we read signs, texts, homework, news, full novels even, but we rarely read letters individually. Each letter is no longer a letter, but a feature on a face, something we take in all at once together. At a certain point there aren't even specific words in our brain anymore, just the concepts that those words invoke, lodging firmly like seeds from the wind. Ask me to recite a book from memory that I just read and I doubt if I could quote more than a sentence or two correctly. Ask me the story, though, and a whole world unfolds. Words are weird, and we don't notice them a lot, especially not the individual parts of them, that's all I'm saying. That's probably why it took me so long to notice.

You know what else is weird? Tombstones. Is there any substance I want to sleep under, on, or next to less than stone? Well, probably. I would prefer that over something slimy or viscous to sleep by. I would prefer it over sleeping somewhere legitimately dangerous. But it is not really the first thing that screams "comfort" to me. However, for the deceased it is expected. What is a rock even supposed to mean? Permanence? Even headstones shift with the movement and settling of earth under it. The earth is anything but still, it can only be still in the same way a body can be still, when every electron of every atom is buzzing around its nucleus and blood vessels and lungs and organs contracting and loosening like the curling and unfurling leaves of a thigmotropic plant. Anyone can move a mountain if they can wait long enough to see it. Stones aren't permanent, not at all. Maybe they ARE quite fitting for memorials though. Stones are quite a bit like memory, deeply imprinting things that affect them greatly, even if the impression constantly shifts and morphs over time.

You know when you go to a graveyard, and a marker catches your eye because the person has a name that looks a little like yours, or a friends, or you wonder if they might be distant family somehow? Well the point is kind of defeated when you know every name in a graveyard. I AM surprised that they got a burial, much more surprised than I am at the bodies in the ground below my feet.

I turn to the other side of the graveyard, starkly apart from my side, as if the dead are standing in separate cliques. The ones that REALLY surprise me though, are the ones with no bodies. And this is where the letters come into play. Because at first I can't read their weird font. I can't even pick out the letters. Then there's no way I CAN'T read the writing, despite not reading any individual letter or word. The stones do not have dates, only names and phrases. SEBASTIAN, BY FIRE; LINUS, BY REGRET; ALEX, BY TIME. There is one name I do not recognize, only one in the entire graveyard, in fact. I could not form the sounds. I have never heard the concept of them spoken aloud before, so what sounds would even be attached to it is a mystery to me. The name rests right above the words HERE LIES

I sigh and turn back to the rest of the graveyard. I hope the curse works, whatever backlash it might have on me. However badly I want to go back to the sea, I don't want more graves filled here, names like mine, or even the names of the townsfolk I have started to learn. They are starting to mean more to me than I would like to admit. Does that make me a traitor? I hope not. They must not be an obstacle.