Layers.
There are layers to this, strata containing hollow permineralized husks, fossilized residue of the past in ribbons.
Some are thin, composed of detritus from a dramatic event, like the charred black clay left behind by a fire, or the powdery silt washed in during a massive flood. Some are thick, and hold scattered bones laid down during periods of climatic stability.
The thin layers tend to run in succession, one after another, several stacking upon each other in tessellated patterns of minor tragedy—fallout from an extended period of change and transition.
Close inspection shows that the thick layers are not as uniform as they first appear, but the colors and textures interdigitate and interpenetrate at the margins so that differences only emerge when comparing the extremes, darker and rockier deeper down, farther back in time, lighter and sandier toward the upper, more recent formations.
And there are recognizable epochs, separated by a thin line sealing the past behind a before-and-after boundary, an asteroid strike, a cataclysmic mass extinction. A single event that changes everything, that rewrites the rules. A child. A divorce. Cancer.
My reverie usually follows a highly stratified epochal frame: a memory emerges, and its extraction unearths others from within its own layer, following a lateral pattern of excavation that rarely scrapes past the borders. In this way I find myself immersed within periods of the past that appear isolated and individuated, as if standing upon too-broad stairs on a poorly designed stairway, impossible to climb with alternating steps, and forced to use the same leg each time—awkward and infantilizing. To travel across layers is to move to entirely different altitudes, qualitatively different realms, to step from the valley floor to the tree line with little or no sense of the interstitial, the complex, temperate, life-abundant areas between.
