Completed: 2024-08-27
The tower had seen many things. It had seen sky, it had seen ground, it had seen clouds, it had seen dirt, it had seen stars, it had seen flowers. It had many many years to consider all these things. It loved them all, particularly when it could see them under the light of a full moon.
The tower had heard many things, and of those things it most loved rhythms. It loved the repetitive mating calls of birds in the spring; it loved the pitter-patter of raindrops that fell both around and on it, sliding down its pointed head; and, though it was a small thing, most of all the tower loved when the working men that entered its belly every morning would idly tap a small rhythm against its interior with their hands or feet. The men were bored and tired, but this action always jolted the tower awake like an itch being scratched inside one’s very soul.
In the mornings, the men entered the belly of the tower, then they would rise into its chest, and one man would climb through its neck up inside its head. This always felt very intimate to the tower. Sometimes the man inside its head would look out at the surrounding forest, which made the tower feel a very strong sense of kinship with him. Looking out was all it could do, after all.
When the men were there, the tower always felt them shift around inside of it, sometimes moving little, sometimes moving lots, always moving with a purpose. The men’s voices reverberated around its insides. When many of them spoke at the same time all the vibrations made the tower feel almost as though it were being tickled.
The men’s voices weren’t very harmonious, unlike the voices of the birds. Sometimes the voices would be strict and orderly, sometimes they would become loud and angry, but most of all the voices felt desperate and unstable. The man who was most often inside the tower’s head would tremble and groan and bang on tables not-at-all rhythmically and throw things and desperately write numbers and cross those numbers out and plead and pray and cry. It unsettled the tower very much and it wished it could do something to help.
One day, the voices got very loud and very desperate. It was night and the moon was very full indeed. The tower had hoped the bright light beautifully illuminating the trees and joyfully dancing along the ponds could comfort the men, but they didn’t seem to notice it at all. Deep inside the belly of the tower, the men huddled around a machine that spoke with a voice that cut like serrated metal and sobbed.
Suddenly the light of the moon grew nearly two times stronger. But no, it wasn’t coming from the moon at all. It came from the horizon. It was far too early for sunrise. The light was three times as powerful. Four times. Eight times. A hundred times. The light was overwhelming. The tower could not see. The men screamed. The tower screamed. It didn’t know it could scream. It didn’t know this feeling existed. An overwhelming sensation sailed through the tower’s skin. The light was slightly dimmer. The tower saw what the light had been hiding. What seemed like a massive tree made entirely of flame.
The tower was too far away to feel the fire, and too far away to be reduced to rubble by the shockwave, but still it experienced what felt like a collision with an ocean. A strange energy surrounded it and entered it. All the men inside the belly of the tower were dead. It would have wept, were it not asleep.
The tower had never slept. It had always watched and listened and experienced, but this was something entirely unlike anything the tower had ever been through. It felt de-made. Like it had un-become or become nonexistent. And so it slept.
While it slept it reminisced on its birth. How strange of a feeling that was. It could not fully remember what it was like to be scattered as rock, to then be collected and changed into a building material, and then for that material to construct the tower that it was. How strange it all was, to be in some way, to be as rock, but not to be a tower, and then to be a tower, but to still be in some sense rock? What was it now? It had felt that something had irreversibly changed, but it did not quite know what.
When the tower awoke, it understood what had changed. The men were dead. Beyond that it felt, though it did not quite understand how it knew that, that it was all men that were dead. That is what had changed. If there were no men to call it a tower, what was it? If there were no men to enter its belly, what purpose did it serve? If there was nobody to traverse its chest and head, to look out through the tower at the world in the same way the tower looked out through itself at the world, what was it?
Overwhelmed, the tower wept, releasing acidic noxious chemicals into the ground below. The tower had housed barrels and packages of strange concoctions brought by the men, and as the tower sagged with age those barrels burst and packages leaked. Pipes broke, wires wore down, chemicals seeped further and further into the ground, surrounding the tower and killing everything in its vicinity.
Good, thought the tower. Let it all die. I can’t be bothered anymore. I can’t be bothered about anything now that I have lost my very self. I shall sit here until I am reduced to nothing and I can finally be at peace.
And so the tower sat, waiting to die.
And so the tower sat, for decades upon decades.
And so the tower sat, indifferent to it all as it no longer felt like a tower.
And so the tower sat, because it had lost itself.
And so the tower sat, as it ran out of chemicals to release.
And so the tower sat, as everything it did release slowly dissipated from the rain.
And so the tower sat, waiting to die as gradually plants came to it to live.
And so the tower sat, as its belly slowly once again became full of life.
And so the tower sat, as vines crawled up its neck like men used to do with ladders.
And so the tower sat, until one day, a flower grew along the vine inside the tower’s head, and looked out the window just like one of the men used to.
And the tower, for the first time in centuries, took a look around. It was once again full of life. The forest was still full of life. But the tower felt different. It felt like what it had seen in the forest had become part of it. The flowers it had seen were now inside of it. They blossomed in its cracks and became its lungs.
Was the tower still a tower? Perhaps it was never a tower. Perhaps it was always just a brotherhood of many rocks. When the forest grew inside the tower, it didn’t matter very much where the tower ended and where the forest began. The forest breathed and the tower breathed. The tower watched with the eyes of the forest and heard with the ears of the forest, while the forest watched and heard with the eyes and ears of the tower. There was never a reason to divide them.
The tower had seen and heard many things, and it loved all those things. And now that the borders of the tower had melted away, the tower could be all those things that it had always so deeply loved.