!The girls
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agk's diary 
17 October 2024 @ 10:30 UTC
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written in woods in midori notebook with dip pen,
brause blue pumpkin nib, kuretake sumi ink
transcribed on GPD Win 1 in bed
 --- 
The girls'd been in the cave before. Farm girls,
empresses of hay, divas of bonfires, they had eyes
for its pleasures.

A tricolor bat clung tiny, inverted, asleep. A
black salamander glistened quick. A millipede
hesitated on the calcite and rust-streaked low
ceiling.

No one remembers from fourth grade to seventh the
cool stability of temperature. None seizes the
cave's memory when she learns acid-base chemistry,
geometric cross-sections, mammalian life cycles.

They remember the mystery of the pigpen's dark, low
crawl. How far does it go? They remember echo audi-
torium's big rambunctiousness, the tight squeeze of
fat man's misery.

Sixty feet, eighty, below the ridge's surface,
there in cold damp dark, nothing changes in the
span of a human life, a human memory. It breathes,
it grows, more stable than we are.