How do you both lay down roots and grow?
It seems like a pulsing, pounding contradiction
To dig in your heels and aspire to brush the clouds
Yet if the soil is right
It allows you to grow
Leaves so you don’t leave
Pedals… for tricycles
Thorns so the band-aids have something to do
The first blooms of firsts
Scrapes, unwrappings, unfoldings, cold calls
Chaotic, static growth in a house of earth
Smells of sour and periwinkle
Whatwillbes and whatwouldabeens
Found only in the quiet solitudes you don’t want anymore
It is all TOO
Much
and little
Icing on my lip Crumpled silver gift wrap A butterfly-shaped balloon
Childhood, sailing like a sugar-sweet ship Not yet exposed to life’s trap Years away, it loomed
Eyes still wide and bright Your hands not as worn Colors seemed brighter back then
You were and are my beaming light Yet your heart was shredded and torn Destroyed from way back when
“Why are you crying?” I asked in the birch-brushed breeze You smiled as you rushed to bury it down You held me tight like I was falling
“Let’s not talk about that, please.” You grabbed my hand and washed away my frown Your eyes went up to where God was watching
“I hope you’re always free as a butterfly,” you then said. “May you always fly free.” “I pray you follow your dreams.” “You will always be my heart.”
Did you know that butterflies are thought of as the souls of the deceased? Spirits that are free of sadness and screams? Did you so desperately want to depart?
I don’t think. I tell myself that wasn’t your way But now I’m old and I know your strife Your sadness wasn’t just my imagination
I pray your your someday And that it brings the whisper of a new life I hope your wings are made of lightness and inspiration
Fly toward the crystal moon Or glide over that fearful, infinite sea And rest those tear-streaked wings on a frail, falling leaf
We both know the sun will always set too soon And amongst them, there’s only so much free we can be But until those days ahead, the idea of flying can be its own relief
None of it made any sense.
I would’ve thought some archaic gondola would’ve been the vehicle to bring me to the afterlife. After all, many ancient cultures figured it’d be at least a boat of some sort. But no, it wasn’t that at all.
Instead, I stood in a giant wicker basket. A warm, strong wind rocked me as if I was in a baby carriage. Above me, checkered spectral squares spun and spiraled upward to form a massive hot-air balloon that drifted steadfast toward the sun.
I knew the balloon well. I knew the different colors of the rainbow swirl within its pattern, the light wood that comprised the wicker. I remembered it better than I remembered the house I called home in my thirties, or my sixties. It hung over my childhood bed in a thin black plastic frame. My mother had cut it from the cover of a phone book and thought it would help me have good dreams. And it was that balloon that took me to somewhere else.
None of it made any sense.
Below me was not a serene cloudscape with rainbows arching from cumulus to nimbus. Instead it drifted over an ever-shifting roadscape, and each path below was one I had taken. The dirt path that cut through oaken woods when I was a child. The highway I groaned to take for my morning commute. The uphill road I took to the mountainside cemetery where my father was buried. It continued to shift by the moment. Some roads made me smile. Some roads made my stomach turn.
There were tricycles and hearses and ambulances and pick-up trucks. Then the paths gave way to buildings in which I spent time in, only the roofs were gone and I could peer right in. Hospitals and houses, churches and classrooms. After a while, the places were speeding by, or perhaps it was I that was going so fast, that I could only see a blur of light below me. But my heart was keeping up. I felt the pitfalls and the escalations. The rises and the falls. The swelling and the breaks.
None of it made any sense.
I would’ve thought that the one to bring me to the other side would’ve been an angel. Or, at the very least, a black cloaked skeleton wielding a crooked scythe. It wasn’t either of those, it wasn’t even my father, who would’ve certainly made it an awkward hot-air balloon ride indeed.
Yet instead, the pilot of the balloon was a standing, ever-shifting mass. There were dogs and cats and friends and foes and all of them, every one of the beings that my life collided with. It went from Charizard, the chameleon I accidentally crushed when I was a child, to the first girl to break my heart. There was the one guy I cut off when I was late for work. There was my wife. There was the friend that I betrayed.
Then it landed on a man in particular that made me keel over with sorrow. He had a beard now. When I saw him last, he was clean-shaven. He had wrinkles under his eyes. A beer gut now jutted out. He smiled and nodded.
“I thought I would’ve had more time to patch things up with him,” I said, my voice cracked with pain.
“He’s saying the same thing right now,” the figure before me said. “He’s saying it to your grandson. You never met him. But you will someday.”
The figure then shifted to more people. More lives I had the chance to impact. Whether I did or didn’t, I was only beginning to find out.
It didn’t make any sense.
Above us, the clear blue sky was beginning to form clouds. Yet the clouds weren’t white, they were patches of star-dusted space. Soon enough, the sky of Earth faded to the celestial cosmos. The balloon became bathed in light.
And still, the figure was still going through all the people.
“It was so much,” I said. “It was all just so much.”
“Nah,” the voice said. “It was a quick trip. They’re all quick trips. So, so quick. You can’t blink or you’ll miss it.”
By the time a hint of night was visible, no one in Underhill was stupid enough to find themselves still driving on the road. Except Colin. He blazed through the small mountain town’s flashing yellow traffic lights and stop signs in his dented junk-food-wrapper-filled jalopy, taking turns sharp enough to fishtail.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he yelled while slamming his steering wheel with one hand and smacking his forehead with the other.
Above, the sharp mountain peaks that loomed over the town became darker and darker. The crimson sunset expanded shadows and morphed the remaining light.
“Be sure to stop by Tycoon Tires for our annual Buy 2 Get 2 special!” an ad rambled on the radio as his own car’s tires screeched with the volatile driving he had to perform.
Home was five minutes away. It wasn’t enough time, but it had to be. It had to be.
Not a single car was on the streets. No one dared to be outside. They were all safe in their homes, nestled and cozy. Just like they knew they had to be during the nights.
Finally, as Colin feared, the tire ad gave way to a loud, blaring emergency signal.
“Citizens of Underhill, North Carolina, seek shelter immediately. The sun is now setting. Life-threatening conditions from the unidentified natural inhabitant is imminent. Do not go outside. Repeat, do not go outside.”
“I just had to get to Clark City for curly fries,” Colin said while screaming curses.
Only four minutes away from home now. He revved his engine and began driving over trim-cut lawns and sidewalks, sending jostling thumping and crashing through the car’s cabin.
Two minutes now. He saw the intersection to get to his street when the ground began to rumble.
“No sense of stopping now,” he said, voice quivering and low.
He roared onto his street and blasted down four, five, six blocks as the rumbling became louder. The emergency symbol blared again from his radio.
Take.
Shelter.
Now.
One minute. He saw his two-story house and his lawn that desperately needed a trim. A squirrel then thought it was a good idea to dart out into the road. In his berserk speed, Colin swerved to avoid hitting the little rodent, yet instead, smashed headfirst into a streetlight which was flickering with each growing rumble.
Steam rose from the crumpled hood of the junker car. A new level of panic fell over him. He could see his front door. It was only four hundred feet away.
“I can make it,” he said.
He threw open the car door and ran for his front door, french fries spilling off his lap.
He slipped in tall grass that twisted around his feet. The rumbling then became so intense, so core-shakingly disturbing, that he fell onto his back and looked up.
Where the mountain range once was, only distant stars now shine before a black, unblinking void. Yet above Colin, there were no stars at all. There was only a massive, hulking, hissing mass of stone and dirt and tree.
The thing shifted above him and nearby, an enormous thud sounded above him.
He sat up to see a pillar of stone smashing down to the pavement. They funneled downward into a widened paw of the same stone and material.
Colin gasped, painful fear piercing his chest, as a second, then third, then fourth earthen pillars, no, not pillars, legs, smashed down onto the neighborhood. He looked up and realized right where he was. He was looking up at the undercarriage of a mammoth beast. Ridges and peaks and cliffsides that once stood as still as statues now shifted as the beast established its footing. Its hide was that of a mountainside.
Out in the distance, at least a mile or two away from his house, he heard a violent whooshing. Wracked with fear, he managed to stand himself up and see a massive tail like that of a tyrannosaurus sway back and forth. Trees and boulders composed its spikes, all tapering off at a massive jagged quartz tip.
Then as the thing swayed its tail, Colin looked in the opposite direction and could see far away to where he was used to seeing an ever-blinking radio tower, a massive head dip downward between the two legs to lick the ground.
At first, Colin thought the head looked like that of a horse. Yet then after starting to decipher the details beyond the rocks and the trees, he saw it looked almost more like a walrus, with two jagged spikes of quarts as its tusks.
He slowly began to back himself toward his door. Yet then, the beast let out a deep, gutteral yawn, sending out a wave of earthy breath over the land. It threw Colin straight into his front door, knocking him into a stupor.
When he woke up, he was still on his cobweb-infested front porch. He looked up and saw the gray of dawn begin to fall over the world.
A loud, slow thumping and rumbling was still heard. He slinked out into his yard to take one last look at the giant beast, but it was already curling back up, his mountainous back facing the awakening world.
It's the fading evening before it all starts and I'm sitting out on the broken yellow bench that we always sat on when the sun sets on Sundays. I sit on the right side, my hand covering the gnawed chunk of wood where the dogs started chewing before you stopped them. My left foot is resting against a hard root. It is my usual position. I remain the same.
But you are not to my left.
Instead, you are inside, pacing back and forth, getting everything ready for the grand event.
You haven't eaten in a week. You've only drunk the clear, brown liquid that your ancestors drank when it was their time to transform. They say it helps prepare the body for the changes that are to come.
You've prepared a week's worth of meals for the children. There is a stack of frozen platters of casseroles and pasta dishes in the large chest freezer, ready for me to simply pop it into the oven and feed to them.
You've cleaned the house to the point where there are no flecks of dust flying around — although the children are sure to undo this brave deed.
You have a space ready where the transformation will take place. Dry leaves cover the coffee-shaded carpet for the bed where your crystal pod will lay. This is where you will heal. And yes, it will be you healing, I have to keep telling myself that. It will still be you.
"I will take care of the kids while you're doing what you need to do," I say. My words stumble and fumble as if I am trying to trudge through a bog.
You smile with your bright, aquamarine eyes and let out a quivering sigh.
"I know you will," you say.
"And if I need help, my mom will be here to help," I say, smiling, rubbing your shoulder.
"I know she will," you say.
But the worry is still over your face, like a sour veil. Who could blame you? You are going on a journey that we know was coming, yet no matter how far away it would be, it would have always crept up on us. Everything is ready but us. Everything is said but what will stay unsaid.
The wind rustles the browned leaves on the oak above me. The moon is starting to come out. I am excited for you. Estatic, even. Soon, you'll be able to fly, and rise and spin. Soon, after some healing, of course, you'll be able to funnel the bright, green energy of the earth and be able to talk to the trees and jump through the wind and churn the soil and quibble with the squirrels if you're so inclined. You will smile the smile I always wanted you to smile.
Yes, I am excited. Estatic, even.
Yet I hope you know, somewhere in there, deep in that crystle pod after it consumes you after you somehow get it to come out of the leaves on the guest bedroom floor, that I love you before, during, and after. That I love you how you are now and always were. That I love the adventures we go on together, even if you are in a flawed, human form, like I am, and will remain. That we were flawed together, and that it was okay. That you were always enough.
I can't wait to see what will come out of the chrysalis. I will have to remind myself that it's still you. That inside the brilliance, it's the beautiful flawed being I perpetually love.
I hope that we will still sit on the yellow bench and look out at the world, although perhaps you will have to hover above it with your flapping spectral wings, now.
I can't wait to see you smile the smile I always want you to smile.
Did you find what you were looking for down there? Or rather, it was a who, right? Where was he? Perhaps he was down in the deepest caverns of the void, where thousand-fanged, multi-tounged beasts chew on the souls of gossipers and instigators and those who fight in the comment sections. Maybe he was in the shadow-covered forests of wires, where technoaddicts are caught and strangled in knots and vines of wires. He wasn't in the Mirrorlands was he? You know, the place where people who take content that isn't theirs and try to pass it off on the internet as original. That's the part where souls are copied an infinite amount of times and they lose track of which one of them came first. Or maybe, just maybe, he was found in the pulpit lands, where those who refuse to back down, those who will not to take the path of empathy and understanding and only assert their own opinions and beat their chests, even when a wave of dead bodies stand behind them, are forced to stand on stilts over lakes of lashing forked tongues and hashtags.
No matter where you found him, I can only imagine what he said to you. Was he sorry for the texts he sent? Did he apologize for ghosting all those people that depended on his response to get on with their day? Did he wished that he shared his Netflix password after lying and saying it could only be on one TV at a time?
My God, it was hard to get you back here. I didn't think that when he texted you "go to hell," you would take it so literally. Yet, wow, you took the plunge. You took the bait. You dove right in after the one who antagonized you and made sure your point was clear, even if you had to raise hell to do it. I'm sure it was hard to resist. It's almost impossible to be the bigger person nowadays when we're all no bigger than a six-inch phone screen.
How did I do it? How did I bring you back to life? I had to sacrifice something. My own world. At least, for a moment. I walked right over to that modem and turned off the wi-fi, our connection to the masses.
And now we're back, together. We're in the dark but in the light.
You sit there, looking out the window, watching the leaves sway in the silent breeze and the sunlight beams through the gnarled branches of the old oaks. The trees are wondering where we all went. I imagine that they think we all must've gone away to some far-off place, instead of diving into a virtual universe, where we all both exist and don't at the same time. Where voices are only significant when heard. But maybe I am kidding myself, and that's always been the way the world worked. We just have better ways to quantify.
Still, though, I wonder and wander. Do you remember how the dirt feels when it gets under your bare souls? Do you remember what it's like to got out there without a jacket? To the raw, unfiltered world?
No, I know. I don't think I do either.
Today, relief comes at a cost. Her pain is gone now. Her eyes are closed. A serene peace and slumber has taken her to distant lands in silence and warmth. She will be able to run and pounce and play again.
She is free.
The parents look down at the stillness and know that there is peace now for their fur baby, their first child. Tears stream down their red faces. There is relief, but, my God, the heaviness and the weight and the rawness of this is too much too bear. They had witnessed her everything, from infancy to senility. It was all of life wrapped up into warmth and purring. And now coolness. It came so quickly, too. Two weeks ago she was pouncing and jumping as always. Then. That thing came. That thing that has taken so many of all species. That thing that slithers in like snakes in the sand and burrows deep inside. It is never satisfied until it goes down with the ship.
The child who never experienced the cold permanence of death screams in shock. He was not ready. He, perhaps, would’ve never been ready. But he was there to make her comfortable. The sweet, gray, ball of fur. The tail that he pulled when he was still waddling. The back he stroked. The body that purred. The love he felt.
The drive home is in silence, only broken by whimpers from all three.
“She’s not in pain anymore, Bud,” the father says to the boy.
No one has the strength to respond.
At dinner they barely eat. Every instance of home is a reminder of absence.
They wait for her to meow for her treats. Instead, the father pours what was left in the bowl into the trash. He must pack the bowls and toys away to donate.
They all lay in the same bed together. It is not a night for independence. They wait for the pressure of tiny paws to pounce onto the bed. They wait to hear her purr.
But they will not.
And that’s okay. It has to be.
Because now, she is chasing her brothers and sisters in a meadow far from cancer or cold tables or lack of appetite. Tonight she is hungry and energetic and a kitten once again.
Tonight she has relief of her burdens.
What are you doing out there in the misty, lavender Mountains of Ere, when you should be filling out spreadsheets and timesheets and TPS reports? Why are you James Nyder, dimension-hopping wanderer, instead of Jim from Accounting? I see you analyzing those ancient runes, those eternally spinning glyphs from gods of old. Your mind churns as it studies every inch of their grandeur.
You’re trying to track them down again, aren’t you? You’re trying to find The Akedemis once again. And, if it all lines up, you’ll find her again, too.
What a beautiful quest. It’s a pure and good adventure. Good (you) versus evil (The Akedemis). You’re hunting down the ones who took her from you. Your love, whose horse was left behind and now follows yours like an orphan. You’re blinded by rage. You’re fueled by rage. You don’t even need food or water or sleep. All you want is to find them. To find her.
The memory of when they took her is clear as the lilac sky above, or maybe the computer monitor in your cubicle. You two were riding amongst the stars, your fiery steeds went from one dimension to another. And then they came out of nowhere. They walked out of those circles as if they were stage curtains. Their boss, Talek the Deathlord, tied her up with his obsidian chains and she screamed for you. You fought a hundred, no, a thousand, of Talek’s grunts. In the end, though, they stabbed you with a multidimensional dagger, sending your wounded, beaten body to another time and space. Now, the mission is straightforward. Kill them all. Get your girl back. Maybe be king of the multiverse while you’re at it.
It’s a nice mission.
One of honor.
One for the good guy.
One where you weren’t the one that caused her to leave. One where you were still the hero. Not just Jim from Accounting, trying to keep your head above water in a sea of grief and guilt.
