Transience
Transience 1
The warm days have returned. Soon the smoke will too. For now, the air still carries the scent of Douglas firs. Pitch drips onto roofs that no longer shield. Moss shrinks and loses attachment to brick.
You were from here. I never was. I wait for roots to crawl up from the earth and grab my feet. I swallow a season's worth of fir needles. My fingers leak sap.
It's never enough.
Transience 2
I reach for your back though I know you're no longer there.
Transience 3
I spent most of the day making a figure from fir branches. I tied the sticks together with twine grown sticky from sap. I placed two pinecones in the chest and leaned it against a tree.
"You'll have to do this now," you said. I nodded, like I understood. You knew I didn't but let me get away with it anyhow.
There are so many pinecones in the yard. I could build a wall with them. A house, a castle, a bustling city of citrus pine-scented denizens.
I kicked the branch-figure over. Tore it apart. Crushed it under my bare heels. I grabbed the pair of pinecones and hurled them as far as I could. It wasn't far.
"You'll have to do this now."
I still don't understand.
Transience 4
My vision is getting progressively blurrier. There are pinecone scales beneath my eyelids. I blink them away but they always return. They must be scratching my corneas. Light hurts.
A pinecone has many eyelashes.
Transience 5
Something is building a nest in my hair. I feel it working up there, dragging talons across my skull, poking with a sharp beak. Clumps of my hair are pulled and entwined with other material. Twigs, I think, grass too, but also found material that I can't identify because I'm afraid to touch up there and I avoid my reflection. There could be body parts up there. Fingers. Toes. A desiccated heart.
Pinecone scales. Pinecone seeds.
The worst is the silence. Just the slightest rustle. Whatever is up there sings no song and utters no cry. In this, we are alike.
Transience 6
Sap hardens. I can no longer separate my fingers. I keep my hands away from my body. The effort makes my arms ache. I sit under a tree and let them drop. Traces of you in the dirt can no longer embed themselves beneath my fingernails.
I lay belly-down and open my mouth to the earth. My teeth take root.
Transience 7
It stops now.