answered prayers and bumblebees

The world didn’t end the same way for everyone. For my mother, I suppose it ended at the supermarket when they stopped selling avocados (because they stopped growing avocados because of how much water it took to grow those avocados (which the people needed) and how much gas it took (which was no good for the already-too-far-gone ozone) to haul those avocados from Avocadotown, California to Northern Oregon, where the avocados didn’t grow). Or maybe it ended for her when the bees stopped coming to her garden and the flowers stopped blooming and her green thumb turned brown and cracked, like the soil she thought of as her second child (she could still hear the buzzing, though). Or maybe it ended for her when I died on that curb. I can’t be sure. I never got to ask her. For my father, it ended when the internet went down, when he could no longer sit behind the wall he had built out of his softly humming screen; when he couldn’t hide behind Java and Excel spreadsheets and lines of code, pupils contracting like some addict; when he was forced to confront living beings, the real beauty of life (and death) (We all put up barriers of some kind. Without them, how would we protect ourselves? But his father’s were unsustainable). Perhaps it ended when he realized that his money, the thin, green paper he had held onto for so long couldn’t buy him the not-avocados from the store anymore (his father was a hoarder of money, barely buying the necessities and never believing in the Tooth Fairy). Or maybe it ended for him when they packed up whatever they could carry and left the only home he had known for forty-eight years and the only son he had known for twenty. Again, I couldn’t ask him.

I hadn’t even realized I was dead until my mother ran right through me to embrace my corpse, dramatic irony of sorts. It was an odd sensation, looking at myself from an objective position (he means to say a third-person perspective; he could never look at himself objectively), standing back and peering at the corporeal component of my being that I had come to recognize in the mirror. The back of my head looked different than I thought it would, like looking at the dark side of the moon.

In hindsight, it’s amazing the kind of attention we give bodies, our own and those of others. The way my parents treated my corpse, my fleshy husk, with so much reverence, so much dignity, delicate touches showing so much love….it sickened me. That wasn’t me. I was me….whatever I was now. Of course, we give so much credence to our physical being. When the earth was still whole and I was still alive, there were countless images of models in tight fitting, crotch hugging garb, flaunting their rippling, muscled, poreless, tanned bodies and piercing blue/hazel/green eyes (never anything darker than a light caramel). They were always selling this or using that (he would often tell people (and himself) that he wouldn’t give in to the lull of the masses, he would not feel the self-loathing that most kids his age felt because they didn’t have those abs or the perfect skin. Of course, all of this was a lie (another kind of barrier, one he had quickly mastered). He would wish his parents goodnight, lock himself in his room and look at himself in the cracked mirror attached to the back of his bedroom door for hours, clenching his muscles as tight as they would go, willing his body to fit with the image of perfection he held in his mind and had displayed for him every day. He would even go so far as to spirit large cans of soup (the kind that doomsday-prep junkies get their hands on (in the end, it turns out, they had the right idea)) and stand in the mirror, lifting the tins and praying for some sort of improvement to miraculously occur, like an insect emerging from its old castings, or a ripple in a pool (He dreamed of power and he dreamed of drowning in a dark ocean). He would try acidic acne treatments that promised healthier skin and promised to attract a mate. He bought clothes that hugged his frame tightly (although, he was lanky enough that when he sat down the bottoms of his pants would rise to his mid-calf and when he raised his arms the fabric at his wrists would come up to the middle of his forearm (he looked odd, like an orangutan who found its way into a Salvation Army donation bin), and he was skinny enough that even the skinniest, skin-tight, skinny jeans still hung pleated and limp on his tiny legs (like a snake, shedding its skin)). All this attention given to a body he now saw lying covered in dust and blood and mother’s tears). Why they cared so much about what they looked like had always eluded me. I never paid too much attention to my body nor did I care what people thought about me.

But this was different. My body, lying there in the debris; it didn’t house whatever I am now, so why bother? My parents went so far as to burn my body, collect the ashes into a Tupperware container they found in the rubble of our house, and carry me off with them to wherever they went (this was weeks later, after he had watched them scavenge every last piece of food they could from the houses on the block, pack it away, and make a shrine in the place he died. In remembrance of their son, of course, but also the old selves they left behind—for the screens and the bees).

(His parents would end up opening the container and spreading his ashes into the Columbia River (vastly diminished at this point) and watch as their son and bits of the curb he sat on and small pieces of the wall behind him, washed away towards some distant ocean they hoped still existed They would die soon after that, his father from an infection and his mother within a week from starvation. Merciful deaths in this new, dangerous, and avocadoless world. He would never find out what happened to them.)

They walked south without discussing any kind of plan, simply heading towards the more populous city. They hadn’t seen the fire and they hadn’t smelt the stench of flesh on the wind. They couldn’t have known there was nothing for them there. Just leave me, I had shouted at them. Well….not me. It was ridiculous, why must they weigh themselves down with something so sentimental? It wasn’t even my body anymore, it was dust, indistinguishable from the very dust that surrounded me after the explosion, the same dust that was now mixed with my old self, like some kind of memory of my location, a plastic terrarium of my last moments. Just leave me, I whispered. To nothing, really. To nobody. The wind didn’t even carry my voice, couldn’t bring itself to touch it.

I realized as they walked away that, perhaps, my parents’ bodies had been enough company. Maybe I couldn’t talk to them and maybe they couldn’t see me, but watching them go about their work of collecting cans, chuckling whenever my dad would pull out some food item from a house and my mother would take it and, acknowledging the expiration date, throw it into the pile of garbage that had slowly accumulated; or when my father would stop my mother from removing every semi-whole photograph of our forgotten world, our now-broken family, from their shattered and charred frames. The end of the world changes a lot in a person and yet we hold onto such flawed, human customs—a desire to piece together a life from pictures or respect sell-by dates. But now, without their loud silences, I am truly alone, not even their movements to fill the emptiness around me. I knew I couldn’t follow them, tethered, somehow, to this street, left with my regrets and the wind as companions.

So, here I was, existing somehow, surrounded by the skeletal bodies of the houses of people I grew up with (he was never really close to any of them, but the death of people, if not close emotionally then close in proximity, reminds us of our own mortality, and although he was already dead, he couldn’t help but feel a shiver of sorts up whatever passed for his spine at the thought of all the lives that were lost). Surveying the destruction around me, I realized how lucky my parents had been. They had gone into the cellar to add more wine to my mother’s collection when the blast hit. On the curb, I had no protection whatsoever (neither physically nor emotionally, sitting on the curb as the heat hit him and evaporated the tears from his cheeks).

After they left, not wanting to fall into the dark waters of introspection, I began testing the boundaries of my new existence. I could walk through the rubble of the houses on the northern most edge of the cul-de-sac, but once I reached the fence in the backyard—what was left of the fence—I found myself at the bottom of the hill our street was on. The same was true of the eastern and western boundaries, the property lines of the eighteen houses on this block creating the bars of my cell (he had only been in jail one time before: he had just passed his driver’s exam and didn’t see the police officer until four and a half miles had passed at thirty-five miles over the speed limit. He was taken in for “resisting arrest” and spent one night in the station’s six-cell jail. He told his parents he spent the night at a friend’s house). With nowhere to go and no one to see, I began to think out loud, using my own voice to fill my hundred yard prison.

Something I quickly came to realize was that time is so interconnected with our physical bodies, with pain and pleasure, food, water and sleep. I used to subconsciously gauge time by the way it affected my body, by my hair and fingernails and my wounds and how fast they healed and the scars they left and the way I embraced my family after long absences. We all fall into a cycle of eating and sleeping, letting this guide us through life, setting a schedule that our body automatically informs us of, helping us track our trajectory through the seconds, hours, years of life. In this bodiless state, time became irrelevant, useless. I didn’t need sleep and I didn’t need food or water. I couldn’t hurt myself (he tried jumping from the roof of house 51795, at the top of the street, one of the only houses with its roof still intact. He landed in the spot he died, on the curb outside his house, seventy feet away from where he should have landed. This wasn’t the first time he had tried using pain as a mechanism to feel and it wasn’t the first time it hadn’t worked). Days and nights blurred together into the continual, dreary gray of the ash-filled skies; I sat for hours, staring into the unblinking eyes of the bodies that slowly rotted in a few of the houses, pretending that they could see me (he pretended a lot when the world was whole, when he was body-alive. He had to pretend, had to hide behind the expectations of others. Who-they-thought-he-should-be was a river with a strong, downstream current, impossible to get out of, but easy to follow if he didn’t resist. Going upstream? Impossible without help). I was an ageless creature, dead amongst the living and living amongst the dead.

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It was in this time that I began thinking about how my world ended. For me, it didn’t end just once. It ended over and over again, long before that curb, long before the explosion, long before my timeless prison and long before I was left to exist myself to madness. It first ended when I slowly realized that, as my male peers began putting words to their attractions towards women, I began silently rejecting my own attractions towards them; it ended for me every night I would stay up and cry and pray to God to change me, make me “normal,” and never received a reply; it ended when I asked one of my classmates on a date and his face wound rapidly from humorous disbelief to revolted disgust, ending with a scoff and a good laugh with his buddies; it ended for me when my parents quickly began busying themselves with sorting the wine in the cellar as I stood sobbing, baring my soul like a bird made of light in the palm of my hands, as I ran outside and sat on the curb and prayed that my world would end—

And, finally, I got my answer….