Just a thing

They weren’t much here. What I mean is that they rose from the pebbles, learned of themselves, waited, and died in a span of twenty minutes. The entirety of their history could be pissed and shat away with the help of a good book. The slow tumble of a rock down the river bed they had made home took half a century with it. As I watched with my feet drifting slowly away, my consciousness descended until I was among the little people as the barest whisper of a shadow and they were but remote silhouettes painted the swirling colors of mud in a stream. I lived amongst them passively, so lost in the moment that their impending deletion never occurred to me. I lost my balance and nearly tumbled headfirst into the murky stream as thin as a vein bled dry. I caught myself. I was here again, and when I looked down they’re not. I wished after they had gone that I had done more, that I’d left a memory to die with them even as mine disappears in blinks and illusions. But the spaces in between the pebbles on the ground are more rocks, blasted into insignificance long before we were ever here.