Marble statues only remain still from a human perspective. From their own, they crawl forth from mountains in their infancy, who raise them like mothers with their volcanic milk. Despite being wrought from stone, they find their own skin to be soft, and it rises and falls as they breathe.
They exist along a separate axis of time, one that hosts its own songs, empires, and gods. When they die in our world, they crumble to dust; in theirs, they bleed black lava.
All that we ever see is a single instant of their reality intersecting ours. The sculptor believes that he has created something entirely new, when in truth, he has simply bridged our history to theirs for a single instant, unearthing a form that was already waiting within the quarried stone. The statue’s time spent as part of our universe is so insignificant in length as to go unnoticed by them entirely.
In their world, we are just as still. There are forests of us, trapped in suspended animation, emerging from the soil by roots of bone. Some of us are at war, some of us are sleeping, and some of us are making love- but all of us are delicate, defenseless things. Their philosophers wander between us and ponder our forms, while their craftsmen break us down and use our parts for industry. We don’t notice a thing, for the moment they see is a cross-section that only exists between our thoughts.
Both of us are lucky to be spared from witnessing what becomes of us on each other’s sides of time. At the very least, we can learn from one another how lovely it is to be free from eternity’s hands.