The Cactus Blooms at Midnight

I turned over the flask and a single lonely drop dangled against my tongue. Weak soup.

I should have turned back long ago, but...I knew. I knew if I turned back and missed it, I'd spend the rest of my life wishing I hadn't. I would die knowing I failed at the only true test of my soul there ever was. Besides, now with the destination in view, I know I was right to go on.

The stars twinkle in the sky above, and below, reflecting in the vast pool of blackness beneath the ropes and wooden planks of the bridge creaking under my feet.

The bridge, it turns out, was a lot longer than had been known. Longer than it could be, truly. I was on day fourteen of the journey, only pausing to sleep when my legs began to fail me, and had not yet reached its conclusion.

Only once did I ever even really linger, a spot where the wood had rotted black and brittle and the path forward seemed precarious. I clung to the ropes of the side like...someone clinging to the side of a rope bridge dangling over infinity. My toes desperately felt at the knots beneath and I was able to cross the gap, but only after mustering my courage and acceptance of death for what could have been hours.

There are support beams jutting out of the darkness every few miles. Rising up from the darkness, they pierce the nothingness, which ripples gently against the moorings, revealing motion without tides. Their origin is a question I've meditated on for most of the journey. Each one's size dwarfed anything I had ever encountered, and each was continuous, one solid beam. Their weight must be incalculable. What could lift them? What could drive them into the ground?

I ran out of food days ago. The drop earlier was my last.

But, the mesa is ahead and in clear view.

When I squint I can see the outline of rocks, the eroding ledges. The black pools of liquid nothingness have almost engulfed everything, only a rare few islands protruded from their stillness and ahead of me was one. I had been to many others by rope bridge, and one, once, by balloon, but this was by far the furthest from the centrality I'd ever been by magnitudes. It was almost shocking to see something in the darkness this far out. If I turn homeward, I can't even see the dim glow of the cities beyond the horizon. There's only the same black stillness I see everywhere else.

Maybe while I've been gone, the blackness has consumed it all and the mesa ahead is the last place left. I grin at that intrusive thought. No, the world is still back there, moving and growing, only slowly being taken. It is just me that is truly enveloped by it right now.

But that's the price to pay to see what I am about to see. Maybe the last to ever see it. Maybe the cost truly is worth it. Or, maybe I will die knowing I am a fool, dying for the dream of a cactus. Its single flower uncoiled, its silhouette illuminated by the moonlight. It is only every thousand cycles the flower blooms, its colors evolved to lure insects to sup from its nectar on an impossible, endless quest to pollinate another lonesome cactus somewhere out there. That's what makes it all so beautiful. It's stupid. A stupid cactus, with a stupid flower, on a stupid mesa, on a stupid world, surrounded by a consuming void that may swell over our heads before we can draw another breath.

The memory of the sight will be a small consolation as I die of dehydration in the coming days, weighing if I should throw myself off the cliff and wondering what it's like to drown in... whatever it is down there. No one knows, we all invent words and images and metaphors, but anyone that truly knows, is lost to it and cannot report the knowledge back to us. I think I will inevitably choose to find out for myself. I am soft, and the hunger will get to me before the dread of the dark.

I wish I could tell you what the flower looks like...

but maybe, someday, you'll see it for yourself.