Anatomy Lesson - E. D. James

The ever-evolving nature of the carnage stuck in my mind, populated my dreams, and dominated my life every fifth day. The death walk tally mounting week-by-week, month-by-month. Slimy wings rejected by gulls’ intestines. Downy piles of feathers in crannies in the rocks comforting the bones that were all that remained of hardy little creatures whose only crime was try and raise a family in the Islands of the Dead.

Death brought me here. A death I never expected. A death I caused. A death that came in the midst of so much life that it overflowed out of my control.
I search for the meaning of that death in observations I record here on my self-imposed island of exile. I hope for a redemption that comes from dedication to something larger than my wants and needs. I pray for forgiveness for a deed committed in a time of turmoil.

The seas and the air and the surface of the rocks that make up the island are in a constant maelstrom that infuses energy into the life that inhabits this fertile boundary at the edge of the continent. Frigid waters charged with oxygen well up from the depths and power an ever-expanding web of life that grows in mass even as the weak are cannibalized by the strong within its ranks.

Surrounded by death that comes in so many forms, I contemplate the inconvenient life that I allowed to be sucked from my womb. I sit with the choice I believed was made to protect, but may only have been an acknowledgement of weakness. I long for acceptance so that I may find the strength to move on and resurrect the light within me.