Psalms of Ninasar, the Watcher
I am immortal.
I am an orphan, an unknown father’s son whose mother, since labor, lay long interred. I have known neither.
I believe when we are born, our bodies first inhale to trap our divine souls in a mortal coil.
Every breath from birth to death is a struggle to keep our divinity captive until that last exhale when the divine prospers and escapes its prison of flesh.
I am immortal.
My soul’s prison is eternity. My solitude is my dungeon, and my failings my scourge.
In quiet hours, I speak in whispers of names and faces I have long forgotten.
They are there just beyond grasping, like the tail end of a wood splinter, they are buried deep in my flesh.
I fear to touch them that, like the splinter, they break, shedding the part touched and delving deeper where only pain and blood can find them again.
I am immortal.
My daughters and my sons refuse my forgetting them, for they have had children, and those children have had their own, and so on, and so on.
Like the splinter — now a part of myself and left to fester for eternity in a forgotten wound — they rise to the surface, and I know them.
Children are a lesson for those who have nothing left to learn.
I am better having known them.
The world is greater for their passing through it.
The pleasure and pain of their coming and the pleasure and pain of their going is my sole rapture, for the joy of a splinter removed is far greater than the apathy of never having one at all.
