CRATYLUS
Much has changed since the last time she came to visit. At least, that’s what she used to always say whenever she visited. We all marveled up at her those first few months, noiselessly wondering how in the world she went about generating such outlandish combinations of words, why she was bothering to share them with us— indeed, at first we debated whether she knew we could actually hear her, or if it was all merely wishful thinking, dumb luck. Eventually, we must have decided that it didn’t matter either way: not to us, certainly never to her.
Secretly, I think we all enjoyed the company. Not many people know about this place, fewer people visit, and the majority of those who do are teenagers hoping to find a new site in which to smoke marijuana or terrorize each other. Granted, the layout of this particular graveyard serves both purposes well: it’s surrounded by cornfields on all sides, accessible only by a streak of gravel that the impromptu car whisks by without so much as a sideways glance. The path itself is treacherously narrow and ill-kept, demanding one’s full attention for about a mile or so until the clearing. From there, the trail loops around a handsome plot of land before closing in on itself and feeding back out to the stray country road. Scatterings of trees line the perimeter, giving the illusion that the cemetery is actually in the middle of a dense forest, corroborated by the fact that most days, the only sign of human life is the occasional aeroplane droning on high.
Typically, the living were too afraid to talk at us for very long, lest we bring them bad tidings or follow them home. Conversely, she told us whatever she was too afraid to say to those living (which, as it turned out, was most things). The fear came from feeling her thoughts were too strange; perhaps there was a time years ago when we might have agreed. By now, however, far too many years have passed for us to harbor such discretions. By now, we have all but forgotten the confounded web of logics which once determined our everyday notions of sanity and insanity, truth and untruth, right and wrong. She suspected this about Death all along, I think, in so many words. She had this ineffable running theory she was constantly trying to catch up to. As an adolescent, Death was a complete impossibility in her mind:
I’m never going to die, she insisted one day. Wanna know why? Of course, we never answered, at least not in the traditional sense; still, she always paused for a moment anyway, if only to collect her own thoughts. Because by the time I’m dead, I won’t even know that I’m dead— because I’ll already be dead. So, like, my death isn’t even something that I’m capable of perceiving. And if I’m not capable of perceiving it, then it might as well not even be real. She sat up for a spell, listened to the cicadas wax and wane, changed her mind.
I’m sorry, she finally said aloud to no one. I feel like maybe I’m being inconsiderate;
I don’t know. Then, in a tone which was laughably serious:
No; Death is real. I’m probably going to die.
As she got older, her opinions on Death continued to parallel her opinions on Life: on good days, Death became wholly irrelevant even in a graveyard; on bad days, Death was all that there was. On days which were neither good nor bad, she felt she was able to investigate her ideas most honestly.
Maybe Life and Death are just… concepts, like energy or money. Maybe there is no such thing as being alive, and no such thing as being dead. Maybe it’s all just being. A bird flew overhead. It was patterned like a zebra and roughly fit her schema of a quail, though she’d never seen one before. Its call was unfamiliar, too. She thought the inflection sounded a bit like if a person were to say “Um… what?” to something unsavory. The alleged quail flew out of her line of sight so effortlessly— but with fervor, as if dead-set on wherever it needed to be.
She enjoyed listening to the birds, studied them intently as if their calls could be transcribed word-for-word with a bit of time and elbow grease. Once, we witnessed her sit for no less than three and a half hours completely unperturbed, bewitched by mourning doves. She was convinced that they put on airs whenever people were around— troubled by their presence much the same way that some become flustered on film— and so she set out to become invisible with the hope that the doves might forget she was there. At around the hour mark, she began to slip into a trance, slowly shedding her self and its wants like old skin. After two hours, the mourning doves began to gossip much more casually. In three hours’ time, the dialogue between them might as well have been that between two gods, or maybe Plato and himself. Eventually, some of us were convinced that she had become our newest addition— we couldn’t find her anywhere.
Only after it was bitten by a horse fly did her body then jolt her back into awareness, her consciousness sputtering back to a steady low hum, and there she was again.
The sun is setting… she offered, her eyes coming back into focus. I need to get going. Still stupefied, she bowed to the birds and began to take back to her rendering, returning her mind to its worldly affairs.
The last time she came to visit, she told us she was scared of Life becoming something she no longer recognized. To her apparent horror, shops and restaurants were always swapping locations from one town to the next— she flippantly equated this to empires rising and falling —and no place felt like home anymore. What’s worse, her favorite tree in the cemetery had been leveled by a recent bad storm: it was mighty and knotted and made a good home for many generations’ worth of animals, wise as any old thing. (I’ve never seen a tree who looked afraid, she had said once or twice.) She used to write poetry about its roots making light work of the bodies they surrounded, chewing us up and then spitting us out ‘till our atoms were too inconsistent for names.
I just wish that one thing in my life stayed the same, she wept. By the time I know something, its meaning is gone! All we could do was rot kindly beneath her.
In due time, I suppose, she will visit again— and the next time she visits, everything will have changed.