A short hike

Awake at three in the morning, thinking of my mom going to the doctor yesterday, the pain in her side, the question of what they’ll find, thinking of how I should go to the doctor for my brambly bird’s nest of ill-defined aches and omens of early onset maladies. My semi-somnia. Springing out of bed prematurely, jarringly and importunately, rictus like a jack in the box at a silent religious rite. The earth so overcrowded the dead won’t have me; the dreamworld at capacity; my unconscious unemployed. Not enough demons and shadows to go around, and the devil is tired of making deals.  

Leaving me with artificial lights, my brain replaced with flickering fluorescent tubes. A still-life serenity, wax fruit cornucopia (this painting might not be a pipe but I’m still going to smoke it). Pop music, the soundtrack of sex traffic, playing in the shuttered retail space in my head; they call them bars because they imprison. Iron-wrought refrains calculated to lower my IQ, muffle the call of conscience, drown out the hallelujah chorus of onwatching angels. What I object to is that my corruption isn’t singular and organic; it’s lab-born, standardized; my own degradation interchangeable and disposal, a bonus at best.  

News of my uncle’s leukemia and Alzheimer's, his dissolving memory eating away at my memory of him, whole years corroded with aluminum. I can barely see those thanksgiving dinners of my childhood behind the grey glint of foiled time, the old gatherings dispersed by projects since abandoned, death’s accounting. My cousins and I threw tennis balls at each other while the adults played cards, my father and uncle were about the same age then as I am now. Some of those ghostly images do still hang in the begrimed attic of the past. The inert wisdom of appreciating the moment, enjoying health while it lasts; never quite provides the spark it should; I hear a click where a bang should be; for we’re in the habit of forgetting to live, mostly because we don’t know what it means or how it feels. Remembering death is a conceit that gains us exactly what we put into it, nothing.  

But then some passages ring with an idea of paradise or happiness, calling eternity to mind. Diamond blue sky of early October, a crystalline radiance overhead making up for the less than brilliant leaves clinging to their shabby green summer coats. On the way to see my parents, Michaela and I stopped and hiked a trail through the stone-cropped hills. A dirt path between stiff brown grass into the cool woods, where boulders lay stacked and mossworn like the discarded shells of giant turtles among fallen trees and rising mayflowers. We climbed down an embankment to a wide creek with smooth pebbles shining in those odd-cut sun beams that had slipped through gaps in the canopy. On the rocky bottom, surrounded by limestone walls striated with copper-wire lines recording the pileup of tectonic time. Chipmunks darted in and out of wood and mineral hollows. The ambient tremors of the forest were accented with shrieking birds and the occasional lowing of cattle coming in from the surrounding fields, so distant and muffled and earthy it nearly sounded like the ground itself clearing its throat.   

An afternoon intimation of pastoral innocence, preview of a return to my origins, before my fall into time, my coward’s journey. God, with a patience greater than the creation and destruction of worlds, waiting for me to reach the end of my prodigal trail.  

We sat on the porch with my mom and dad, gazed out at the road between faded hydrangeas. Between nods and yawns we talked of doctors' visits, Thanksgiving plans, other topics already forgotten. My gratitude for my upbringing feels inadequate, my presence discounted by illegitimate aims dragging me off, but I hope it’s enough, that for the time I’m there it does us all some good.  

Because I always have to get back to my fake real life in a tinkertoy town. And interface with alien robots and send job applications to digital compost heaps. Send more electronic distress signals for my sinking flesh. Fail captcha tests and mistype passwords so many times I want to break my laptop in half over my knee. With far less patience than God, I wait for answers, reviews, confirmation that not all my clacking and scratching has been in vain, while my roots dry up for lack of fresh blood.