Unearthed this week from the minds of Gravekeeper (CA) and Overwrought (CA), Only the Stone takes us on a slow and steady journey through the stages of loss.
It begins with a door opening slowly to reveal a hollowness that cuts with the sharpness of unfollowable rifts, kicking us sharply through the entranceway and onto the floor. Our awareness of our struggle to rise grows aloof as the pace retracts with the blades. We are numbly swept into the procession of mourners who drift heavily from side to side to the beat that drones rhythmically like a rusted pendulum. Falling into the line of ceremony seems to be the only reasonable self-preservation tactic, as peace is more easily reached through distraction than reflection. But as the drummer leading the pack hastens aggression as the plot approaches, the extreme sorrow creeps up once more through the pulsing of anxious adrenaline. As our bodies become no more than homes for unrelenting lightening storms, we march on to the call to war.
As fast as it came into the world, it has vanished underneath, leaving us drenched in the mockery of carrying onwards as if the shards emerging from our skin are still a whole globe around our hearts. We can recognize that the tone has become brighter as grey skies fade white, but it is still heavily distorted by endless layers of clouds. The shrillness of others’ delight is harshened by the resentment of the lack of our own until we are teetering on the wrong end of a word or whip we may regret. But after long, the world so callously and unrelentingly turns enough rotations that we no longer pay its rumble any mind. All vocalization is held at a distance so far that it becomes no more than echo indistinguishable from wind howling outside the window of that home you entered seconds or days or years ago. All sense of time has been lost in the blurring of shadow and light.
Melancholy softens until it becomes light enough to float into the atmosphere, quietly lingering. Our stride walks in step with a previous life, and our bodies dismiss the thunder to welcome the vacant euphoria that comes after the panic attack retracts back into the ceiling cracks. A piano asserts the rites of dormancy, burying the drumbeat of the death march. But no matter the act we perform, the claws will come to snatch us in the early hours of one unsuspecting morning, pulling us down to the cellar with a tenfold force. The chains over our throats are unlocked to unleash the rage we were never granted, but is silenced by the confines of the sealed echo chamber. We are left to pick the stitches of our chronic conditions, which, after all this time, were treated as curable diseases. Let us not forget that solar flares only cease when the sun has become eternally extinguished.
And so, our final low, heavy breaths are reverberated in the turn of the wheel of the mausoleum’s vault, until finally, all fate is sealed. Loss only relinquishes its grips once we, too, are lost, leaving only the stone to remember what was.
For more melding of metal and macabre, pay a visit to nofastbands.tumblr.com