Epiphyte

[scribal_goddess]

 

Kia – I have taken your advice, and now my bones are filled with an aching light.

One after the other I swallowed the wrinkled fruit hearts, pruned and ancient and full of a sharp, growing scent without the hum of the beating heart of all things. For some time they sat in my stomach: I digested them.

Later, I found a bucket in the basement of the dead house and stared deep into the red and pink bile that had torn its steaming way up my throat. I hadn’t thought I’d eaten that much food since the house died, but time has been passing strangely, in great wet chunks detached from form and substance.

Perhaps I was too late. It seems that my current body has rejected the sun joy of existence, the simplicity of survival and satiation. My blood is incompatible with redemption – too much was shed without ever touching my hands. Or perhaps I am simply sickened by old cans of beans and the everpresent rustle of my ghosts.

I lay on the ground breathing damp earth and learned what must be done to step to one side of pain. I still feel… rather worse for the wear than I was before your last letter. Physically. I have spent endless chunks of time asking myself what I will do if I am the last living thing here, if I have finally passed beyond the doors. I suppose that if nothing awful happens to me I will live until I die, alone with the swish of pine trees.

If the food stores in the house give out and I cannot find more it might not even be long. There are no more mushrooms in the basement, just cans and jars and sacks of things required to fuel one arguably human body.

I am alone here. I always have been destined to solitude, killing the structures and society that encloses me as I struggle to stay afloat in a sea of past lives. Gifts seem to be beyond me. Love is a substance that ebbs and flows and that people nail to all the wrong ideas, expecting perfection and endless patience and a transmutation of two into one, of one self to fit into another’s plans. As if a lover, a child, a friend were made of raw clay ready to be baked into a functional brittleness empty of all other forms, broken and useless if that shape ever chipped or changed. The idea of disposable people has existed far longer than Styrofoam plates, and in all my lives I have never been rooted fully, so a part of everything around me that the doors could not tear me from what I loved.

I don’t want you to think that this means I am unhappy: far from it. I am happy for you, for your rootedness, for summer sunshine and long afternoons of sunlight scented laundry. I am happy for the sudden chill wind of autumn tossing the goldenrod back and forth, for the leaves falling to a musty rot on the forest ground, for the tiny dabs of caulk in all the nooks and crannies of your house.

I am even glad that if another letter never slips between the cracks in our realities, it will mean that you have found something vast and inhuman and magnificent, a worthy place to subsume your soul.

Perhaps, not strictly speaking, happiness as most would envision it, but I think you have the right of it – happiness is an event, a vision of the future, the picture that exists in your mind before paint or pencil ever touches paper. People do well enough in life by trying to achieve it when they have the time and space. And love – not romance, or obligation, or the acceptance people say they give you when they are waiting for you to change, to say that they were right all along – is a vast and unfettered space. You can run in it, but if you expect it to never change, you’ll press it as flat as a pinned butterfly.

In another life I was told that my problem was that I didn’t love myself. It seemed counterproductive to ask the nice old man with the half moon glasses which self it was that I didn’t love.

I climbed down the cliffside today and found a ghost town. I don’t know what I expected beyond the smudgy grey horizon – the very air of this world tastes dead and rusty and for a time I searched as myself, then as myself from before. I had no time left – the medicines I needed would never make it past the blockade in time to make any difference, and I had accepted that there was nothing I could do about it. But I had children to feed, and the bombed-out ruins might not yet be picked clean by the ragged human vultures that had once been my friends and family, enemies and neighbors.

A can of baked beans keeps for a very long time. Spam is a favorite of many – do you even have spam, where you exist? – and pickles and jams have been known since time immemorial. But beans, roasted over the fire in their metal jacket, taste of the harsh clack of train tracks and the whistle of wind in hair and beards grown out as a futile barrier against the cold. Shame is not bitter – it tastes of tin and the fear that comes with having to prove that you deserve to live, and another does not, because you can work harder than they can.

I only came back to my current self when I found the door.

To be quite frank, it wasn’t truly a door – it was boarded up and there was a hole in the wall next to it, and it so very clearly opened on a shed full of rusty tools that it initially aroused no suspicion. But I had seen it before, a déjà-vu sharper than the knives that filled my stomach with a leaking illumination, the pain I’m still standing to one side of.

The door had come for me.

But it hadn’t come for me today – it came long ago. I still don’t remember which life it ended.

And now it’s nothing but an ordinary piece of locked wood and metal hinges.

***
It's been a while since I turned out something related to the Pen Pal Project.This is a response to Kia's last letter, Love and Summer. Previous chapters can be found here.