I woke up thirsty and drained. I peeled my lips apart and struggled to ask for something to drink. Only a rustle came out. It was then that I noticed the wetness around me. Felt the sweat of our embrace. I pulled you even closer, hoping to absorb the moisture. Hoping to absorb you.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been in the darkness. There was no time there. There was nothing at all. It was the waiting room for where dust is made into people. I felt like the gods didn’t know where to put me. And they certainly didn’t want to talk to me. The gods have been quiet for a long time. Their voices reduced to raspy leaves.
But if this was a waiting room, it was awfully empty. Whatever I was waiting for apparently wasn’t very popular. When I came back Ariom said he could smell the death lingering on me. I smelled like transition, the musk inside a leaf pile, a freshly fallen death trading the greens of life for the deep reds and oranges and peaceful yellows of Fall.
I’d awoken from my hibernation, but I was trapped in this arboreal estuary. That small death was frightening, but beautiful. Erupting like the tops of trees. Bursting into bloom with a kaleidoscope of petals. Fertilizing my breath with gusts of pollen. Ripening me into a fruit. Dropping me to the ground to become a tree again.
******
My days as a cup-holder made me well suited to be a table. In the time it takes to yell “timber” I was transformed from something to rest in to something to rest on. My inner rings of age became outer rings of not-using-a-coaster.
I worked hard to make that leaf pile before I dove into it. I landed as a bird onto my own branches, scurried down them as a squirrel, hit the ground like a lion, and dove into that pile like a child.
******
Ants produce a chemical beacon when they die. Broadcasting their death, the other ants come to carry them away and deposit them in the pile of discarded workers.
******
I slowly untwisted myself from the pile of death that we had become. I wiped the chemical secretions from my forehead and brushed the leaves off my back. Someone gave me lemonade to bring summer back into my throat. I struggled to remember where I had just come from. At first, I wasn’t even sure what had taken me there. I felt like a van Winkle waking from a “nap”. Perhaps if I worked backwards, I would figure out how to proceed. Everyone around me would have to stare at me for a while longer until I sorted this out. I fixated on the repeating triangles of the geodesic dome above me, held you again, and dug my neural roots back into the alkaline soil.
I remember a portal opening up…
My eyes were open at first as I passed the pipe between us. Each hit making it harder to see. Harder to move. Harder to be. The colors shimmered out of hiding, slowly at first, like munchkins showing me the way to the golden road. They danced and sang to me. We played together until we were called home by our mothers.
One by one, the shapes collided into a rainbow aperture. They shuttered open. In a flash I was inside. I shot down a teleportal lens. With a snap I was frozen in time.
There was an immense feeling of emptiness. Loneliness. Yet, there was a peace in the emptiness, a comfort in the nothingness. The lack of exposure promised endless possibilities. Like quantum photos, the negatives become positive and the meaning rests somewhere in that silver substrate, submerged in a bath of chemical development. Photosynthesis. Absorbing light in a dark room. Choosing the perfect filters to expose a captured moment.
I don’t know how long I had been there. My memory was piecing back together like the fractal puzzle I’d entered. They asked me if I was okay when I came back. Apparently, I’d been writhing.
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