Imprints In The Sand

You teach people, the same people for two, three, four years. You would like to think something of you (hopefully something good) stays with them. It is like mana, the excrescence of numinosity.

But one day, they're gone. The link is gone, and if not gone, is stretched by trail and contrail, or trial or mistrial, to a tenuous something that isn't even quite there. With time, the associated ideas and memories will fade. And the essence of you will be lost; after all, they owe you nothing, and you have paid your debt.

Sometimes, though, the magic may return. The mana reforms, is magnified or transformed oddly. The old wolf, decrepit but dangerous in his lair, is remembered; the egg of the dead phoenix is reborn. This is how a sword is forged: tenuous strands of metal are hammered, rebonded, recrystallized, broken and remade.

And although the steps you walked those months and years ago are washed clean by the salt water on the sea strand, the fact that you once made them is not lost. It has a mana of its own. Hence, the Eternal Hoodlums. Hence, the many faces on the Book of Faces.

You sit on the stony margin of the beach and watch the footprints wash away. There is regret, perhaps, but that too washes away. And the new years begin, one, another, a third. They end, and time ends with them. What remains is joy.