I wanted to see trees the way that you saw them, not just color and movement, classification and function. I wanted to taste the sun in strawberry, see myself in others and have something like a life before my death. I didn’t manage that, but I have managed to draft this here, now, which will just have to be my consolation. I am collecting all the pieces of me from when I was alive, trying to find the leaves that serve the tree.
I saw you at my funeral. I wanted to say something, but:
1. I couldn’t,
and:
2. What would I say if I could?
Everyone’s words arrived like a fugue, their contrapuntal compositions echoing, and none of them could hear the melodies they were making. I saw something in your eyes then that I’d never seen while alive.
This is not much different than when I was here. There’s not a distinct boundary or separation. It’s a gradual process, and you don’t always know when that process has begun. I was in the process of dying for a long time before they put me in the ground, and it’s still not over yet.
I realize now that I had glimpses of it. Moments waiting in line at the grocery store, realizing that these signs advertising products will be replaced, then will be gone. These people will one day be gone, and the store will be as well. Time will sweep its dust under the rug of the world, and there will be nothing at all to see anywhere. There will be not even the concept of nothing. It’s like that, being dead is. It’s a strong dissociation, but it’s not a severance. At least mine isn’t. It’s seeing yourself see yourself, till it feels like you’re looking into a mirror that’s facing another mirror, reflecting ad infinitum. And I’m pretty much tired all the time.
I realized as I was dying that I didn’t want to die, but it had reached an irreversible point in the process, so I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to soon be dead. It just became a fact.
And then I went away, and my body was a collection of buzzing, brilliant things, separated by color and shape and size and weight, so it was like I was seeing all my composite parts. And there was my idea of you, alone in an unlit room in what used to be my mind. I never saw the fine details, you used to tell me. I’d never miss the forest for the trees, but then I’d never really see the trees at all.
Think of anything you’ve ever seen, and then forget it. Forget that you’ve forgotten. Anything Anthropocene is gone. Anything natural is gone. There’s something there, but it’s more like a vague feeling than an actual presence. There’s not really color. I don’t want to talk about it too much.
If I focus, I can almost see a world outside of myself, outside of what I did. I can almost breathe again.
I dream memories. When I dream, I’m back in the world of matter and color and wind on arms and light in bleary morning eyes. It’s nothing pivotal. It’s the small moments, the ones we shared. It’s waiting in line at the grocery store and eyeing tabloids, dollar chocolate bars, gum, the hum of the conveyor belt and the mechanical hey-how-are-you when it gets to our place in line. It’s crunching through fall leaves, adjusting steps to coincide, and the warmth of the sun past the chill, past the gray, past it all, and feeling that there only is just this moment. Only ever will be.
Liza Olson 