The Archaeologist

Sam -
Digging. That's really what I do. I mean, there are fancier words for it but they really only mask why I am here, doing this at all. I'm an archaeologist. I live almost exclusively in the past. I always have. Even when I didn't have a past of my own. When I was four, my father
used to yell at me for trying to bury our cat in the sandbox. It wasn't that I wanted to bury the cat or anything like that. I just wanted that feeling of sinking my shovel into the soil, or sand in this case, and finding something. At that point, I was scared to dig for things that I didn't bury myself. I think I was scared of plunging into the ground and not finding anything and I wondered where that would leave me afterward. Would I keep digging forever? Would I simply give up?
(Laughs.) Well, I obviously didn't give up. But where did it get me, really? I mean, digging and not finding anything is mostly what I do. I always want to give up. There is always that part of me that still wonders if I will one day fall into some sort of trance and then just keep
digging. Digging and not unearthing anything. Searching, never finding. I sometimes think I could probably burrow into the earth, as far as I could go - and simply let the planet swallow me and melt my skin so that I would never return from that point. But that hasn't happened yet. For now, I come back to this for months at a time and find nothing of importance. Nothing, but my own love of digging deeper. Constantly seeing the holes around me grow until I can see nothing else. Nothing but one large hole. And there I am, standing in the centre and I see nothing. Just a hole. And I want to give up. But I dig deeper, I always do.
And then, there's that moment when you hit something. And you pull it out of the ground and it becomes more than what it is. A metaphor? A symbol for everything that you have done in your life to this point. A justification. But it's more than just about easing your own guilt for maybe entering the wrong profession. That bone, that skull, that tiny piece of a cracked clay pot. There's a moment. There's a moment where you and the object cease to be independent of each other and you are filled with the simple essence of each other. And you hold on. Hold on to that moment and you feel that if you pushed your shovel any deeper that you would discover all the truths of the universe buried beneath ground. You know, for that second, that digging deeper would cause the ground to explode and light, blazing white would rush from the cracks. Light. (Happiness, mixed with disbelief.) Light.

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A monologue. Finally.

-KB.