The world ends and remakes itself with every tired blink of my eyes, with my eyelashes caging in that fractured snapshot of the rest of the world, sweeping it into the recesses of my memory, and wiping it away all in one motion. My socks fall down inside my inherited hiking boots; mud clings to their edges like desperate leeches, carried along like stickyweed seeds to be planted in earth it has never seen before. Velcro-plant, hitchhikers, goosegrass–the things that stick with me and make my skin itch after I brush against them, old thoughts and songs that spin around in my eardrums like an endless whirlpool as I wander the empty, winding brick paths. I trail my hand along the metal railing as I traverse the wet cement, ignoring my reflection in the wall of windows to my left. I should call my grandmother about the world ending. I blink again, the cold air finding its way deep into the creases of my face. I open them and it looks the same, but my stomach twists as I imagine the news articles she’ll cite and the dire predictions she’ll spit out that will echo the ones needling my own brain. I have to grow into this apocalypse; she’s growing out of it, sweet peas climbing the trellis of age into the cosmos. I wonder what this cataclysmic event looks like when you’re eighty years old. I wonder if she’s as alone in her stuffy and beige Seattle apartment as I am under the cold grey sky; does the overpass sing to her like the wind whispers over my shoulders and behind my ears, the constant roar of the world around us jolting along in a disjointed tandem?
My knee aches where I ran it into a post a week ago. The bones in my hip grind and pop just enough to be uncomfortable, my body tapping me on the shoulder with a reminder of all the hard falls I took while climbing. Mud licks up the back of my leg, the earth offering a soft caress and grafting pine needles to my skin as I go on my way. It’s November, but it doesn’t seem like it– the lack of chill makes me wonder if everything is falling apart even faster, if the flannel jacket in my closet is obsolete and things will keep burning.
The sun swims closer to the horizon as I wind around empty brick buildings, yellow leaves chattering over my head. I ache for home, the comfort of being swaddled in the confines of technicolor plaster walls and the sweep of a cat’s tail, the rattle of the pellet stove, the smell of peaty swamps and the cry of the eagles as they snap off branches for their wintertime nest. There’s no birdsong here, not right now–only overfertilized, murky grass without moss to hold it together when the rain comes and the slick stone paths dictating where I walk. I blink, eyes aching. My hands are numb from the cold. I want to plunge them into the soil where the hyacinth bulbs have gone dormant and tangle my fingers with the roots of the massive trees overhead; maybe, in the mulch, it’ll be warm, and the world will finally come together and make sense. They are not there, gone with the summer warmth, and when I close and open my eyes, they are still gone beneath a bed of burnt pine needles and dead leaves. The shadows of the maples shiver and snap like a camera shutter. I keep walking, thoughts drifting to those of diamond-sharp snow despite the brightness of the fall colors overhead hiding away the sky. Perhaps if the landscape is blotted out in blinding white, if everything appears different and reemerges new after the thaw, things will be reformed as they should be. I know, though, we do not follow nature’s calendar, and mid-winter will be a new time of mourning.