[twwm] what it is to rot

Do you know what it's like to float on the surface of a lake?

Do you know the feel of the water cupping your body, silky smooth like enrobing chocolate? Does she speak to you, the water, in all of her whispering, trembling ways? Her calls of lapping waves against pebbled shores, greedily slurping up the feathers left by migrating birds, and toys left by wayward humans.

Have you heard the silence of nothingness ringing in your ears like the creation of the universe, and the gentle shudder of her breaths when the frost comes? Have you felt the fish beneath you still, gather slowly into the warmest, deepest niches?

Do you know what it is to be without?

I have been many things in my existence; a home for creatures in storms, an ornament for photographs, a warm place for sunning snakes and turtles and lizards. I have bobbed on the surface of this pond for as long as I have been, but I have never truly been.

I was once a piece of driftwood, and I followed along with the currents of my lake. Holes were gnawed in me, deep gashes in my dead flesh that I could not feel. I sprouted, a few times, an unnatural ripening of the seeds that had burrowed into me, raising their heads to the light that filtered down from above.

And yet, through everything I provided, I felt nothing. I was, in fact, nothing.

To be without is to be the absence of everything, and simply, this is what I was. While untrue as it may be - for I was not nothing, I had tangible form - there was nothing to my flesh.

I did not feel the joy of becoming a home for the squirrel kits when I washed up upon the shore; and I did not feel the grief nor the frustration of the snake who became stuck on my bark when I floated back out.

This is a part of myself I have left behind, impermanently etched into my being forever. I carry the depth of my weightlessness on my body, marred like a scar that forms me, that I cannot exist without.

There are many words for driftwood, for what I was. Bois flotté. Legni. Mitig and Azaadiisag and bole.

There are no words for what I am now. Creature, ghost, spirit, walker, I may call myself. She who lives in between; no longer Azaadiisag, instead unseen.

The wood of my former body haunts me like it did the lake I lived in. Died in? There is no proper classification - I let the lake cradle me, because I was not yet born. I felt the faintest jealousy inside the mycelium that crowded my skin, for the canoes that traveled past my pond. They were smooth and polished and well taken care of - oils glimmered on their unbarked selves, deep cherry and yellow poplar, chestnut oak and reddish cedar.

If I had been anything else before what I am now, I suppose I would've grieved to lose it. Instead I am delighted to feel, to experience, to love and hate and grow angry. I have finally been able to breathe the air of my pond as I became something from nothing, the sprout of the shoot, the fruit of the mushroom.

To live as something besides what I have always been is to be born again like a duckling swimming for the first time. There is an art to the transformation of the self that I have undertaken, forcefully so, as I was not given a choice. But here I stand now, above this dock - my creator behind me - looking out. There is a world I have never experienced besides the news from seedlings and rumors from lizards.

Do you know what it is to be driftwood?

Do you know what it is to forget who you are?

Of course you don’t; you never could know. There is an infinite difference between you and I; our forms moving and unmoving. Yours, loving and living, breathing, singing, dancing, holding. You forgot your love, and I forgot what it was to be nothing.

I am not bitter.

I am not hateful, I do not grieve.

But there was a peace to floating upon my pond, a home, a sanctuary, a loving hug of the water and her creatures.

You will never know what it is like to be a creature of the water without control over yourself, you in your power and conformity and understanding of yourself. You will never know what it is to be subject to her whims, like the teeth of an animal buried into the flesh of another, like the limp leaves that float in her waters.

You will never know, and this is not a crime.

There was a quiet stillness that I will never experience again, as the loud sounds of everything assault my senses; there was an unending death in the wood I was, in the grain of my body. This is something you and I will both never know again, and in that way, we are alike - in that way, I have left behind my nothingness, and become something that has never existed before.