They say the Outer Banks will disappear someday, washed away by storm surge into the vastness of the Atlantic.

But they won’t. Nothing disappears. They may be dispersed, but they will not vanish. Fragments carved from the distant Blue Ridge Mountains, granules of ancient sea creatures–these things cannot simply disappear into nothingness, small though they may be. They will persist, though in diaspora.

But then, some things do disappear. They vanish, anyway. Light–where does it go? We know on starry nights that we are seeing the ghost-lights of suns long dead. They have burned out but their light persists. Is this how it is with moments, souls–they keep journeying long after they have left the bright burst of their origins? What happened to the first flight? When something is done, does it just vanish? Somewhere in time, Icarus’s distant cousins are finally succeeding where he failed. Does anything stop happening, or do we just move away from the place in time where it is happening?

Where does the light from a fire go when it is extinguished? Does it just cease to exist, or does it keep traveling, like the light from distant stars?

Nothing is forever, and yet nothing ever really disappears, either. We are fashioned, sinew and bone, from the first explosion of the universe, from the moment of beginning. We are all the point of our own origin, and we will die and decay, but we will not disappear. It is a metamorphosis, really, like that undergone by the caterpillar who turns to goo and emerges something wholly different yet made from the same stuff.