Granite Mandate
Dust settles under fingernails as one brushes away layers of ochre from a buried ceramic mask. Its empty eyes stare back with the singular, heavy presence of a basalt pillar etched by centuries of wind. To meet this gaze is to feel the weight of everything left unburied beneath the silt. In this stillness, the identity once known dissolves into the grit, leaving only the quiet sediment of what has been reclaimed.