i beholding

One of the things we used to do as kids that will forever be embedded as a strong sense-memory in my brain is on nights with a full moon in deep winter, my siblings and I would layer up in all our snow gear and march out onto the middle of the frozen lake, sit down in a circle and tell ghost stories. No flashlights, no lanterns, just the moonlight bouncing off acres and acres of white and the wind howling; the bite of sub-zero air and the stark clarity of starlight in a high frozen atmosphere. You tell yourself that nothing can sneak up to you on open ice but the snow snaking in the wind makes it seem like things are moving all around you, sneaking low and flat and casting strange pale shadows. Sometimes the snow made sound go dead and still but you could still hear the ice under it all, and the resonance of it made us speak in whispers only. And when our fingers and toes started to go numb and we ran out of stories, we'd slide-march our way back home over the ice again, and half-believe that whatever monsters we had made up were following us back over the endless ice.

This is how religions get started.

whoever marches first must not turn their eyes from the light of home, and whoever is last must not look back, or that-which-walks-on-snow-with-no-sound will follow past the threshold, and your breath will go cold before you wake.