Apostle

I can feel the texture of his cloak on my fingertips. I can smell his sweat mixed with oil. I can feel him looking at me from across the fire but when I look up he’s not there. All of us feel it. None of us can remember who he is, or was, but then we don’t know who we are either. The fire burns but never goes out as we try to remember what it is we’ve lost along the way. For a while, we had long talks, trying to fit together the clues, for each of us has a fragment of a memory that we can’t fathom but we haven’t talked for a very long time. Each of us is alone in our exile and we wait. We wait for someone to tell us who we are, we wait for an end to this confusion, we wait for the return of the humanity that has been stripped away from us, we wait to face our accuser, we wait to earn his trust, we wait for an end and a beginning, we wait for all eternity, bound by our failure to never know how we failed, or who, but I can feel the texture of his cloak on my fingertips and I can feel him looking at me from across the fire.