Chapter 11: Mapping Their Veins and Flesh

I’m fairly sure I regained some form of consciousness after about 18 months. Before that there was nothing. No light, no sound, no taste, no smell, no pressure inside my nondescript box. There was no ticking of a clock to mark the time, no calendar to cross off the days. I have no memory- much like looking back on your infancy and childhood, trying to recall what happened. You know it happened, but you’re damned if you can remember. Then as you grow details begin to stick, memory fades in and out. You remember those random instances like drinking cordial on a summer’s day, or drowning your sister’s doll in a puddle, but important milestones slip your grasp. The order of events is jumbled. You can’t say with certainty if you first took a bite of an apple, or hit your head on a doorknob.

I cannot recall the exact order, but I remember the sensation of being cradled, like a child being held too tightly to its mother’s chest. I had an overwhelming feeling of comfort. I’m fairly certain that my first concrete memory amongst the jumble of half-thoughts was of being softly tickled. I remember thinking it a curious sensation.

I remember the taste of air. Sweet, glorious air flowed through the microscopic cables and pores of my body. The decay and fertiliser of my body, my atoms and ions, were siphoned through billions of miniscule pores by nano-pumps, delivered to the core, distributed and fed through the walls of trillions of cells. My carbon sequestered in cellulose and my remaining oxygen powered up the trunk, out the branches, through the leaves and into the atmosphere.

Weightless and at peace. I closed my eyes and soared.

I filled out leaves, mapped out their veins and flesh. I remember sunlight. I leaned back in glorious recline to bask in the healing glow of its radiation.

My education has continued since my death- through the whispers of the bush, the voices of the living as they pass, and the letters left buried at my feet. Even now I am sure I have but scratched the surface of the skin of all there is to know. I certainly wouldn’t be so gormless as to suggest that I know as much as those looming wistfully over the wires. Their wisdom is ageless and I am but their eager student.

Much of my learning has occurred in parallel with my siblings. As I was coming into consciousness they conspired to dig a cubby-house underground, a hide-away from the eyes of the other kids, their own secret club. They dug into the hill some meters across from my grave. With picks, mattocks and shovels stolen from the shed they dug down and into the gravelly hill until they reached the chunky sheets of ironstone barely 3 feet down. They lay scraps of corrugated iron over the top to act as a roof and piled sticks and branches on top as camouflage against invading forces. They toiled for weeks during breaks in their lessons and chores, digging first one room, then a passage leading to an another and a third separated from the others by a trapdoor made from a flattened drum. Alcoves were dug into the walls for stolen candles to lend an ethereal quality to the stale air of a thousand centuries. All the while Mum and Dad looked on bemused, yet thrilled by the ingenuity of their offspring.

The cubby-house became their personal library. They would secretly slip small pieces of paper into holes drilled into the walls, offering their thoughts and feelings up to the unjudging worms and microbes. They wrote down their feelings, the things they deemed too emotional, too obscure, to ever say out loud. These were their heartfelt words.

They did this while not even aware that the other was mimicking their own actions. When these- their heartfelt words- could be translated into words they would slip away from the house, peel the soiled hessian sacks from the doorway and burrow down on all fours into the darkness. Illuminated by parallel lines of light filtering in through nail holes in the roof, they would light the candles with the matches they stowed in their pockets and cast shifting shadows against the walls of their secret tomb. They would loosen the dirt at a non-descript part of the wall and burrow a small hole in which to bury their notes, then leave, sneak out as if the softest sound would reverberate through the earth and alert the world to this private act, never to return, surrendering them to the bugs and the germs.

I enclosed their hideaway in my loving embrace. I pined for them. As my embrace tightened, my roots discovered the abandoned parcels. My fingers wrapped around them and I devoured their very being, taking the ink up into my body and memorising their shape and form. Slowly I built a compendium of words and taught myself the conventions of the English language, piecing them together to form sentences of my own. It was from these notes and against their emotions that I learned to write.

My self-discovery was like a mirror of my childhood learning. At first I had no control over letters and words, just as I had no control over my new body. With time and practice I could reorganise the jumble of characters to form words. I could control which part of my body I inhabited. I learned to read, then to write. I could manipulate my limbs, my leaves, my pores. I could compose my own stories and treatises. My body and mind became perfectly aligned and I became myself.

I became attuned to the whispers and conversations of the spirits around me- sometimes whimsical, often wistful, always wise. I learnt the secrets and knowledge of the bush and became myself a part of that world. They rejoiced at the sight of life, and in time my voice would rise in unison. We hushed as one in reverence at the climax of death and mourned the loss of another friend.

As I grew, so too did the space surrounding me. My peers were removed by Progress and with each loss the silence of the spirits spread. In solidarity I grew that little bit more erect, spreading my limbs ever wider to compensate for the air cleft between our bodies. To compensate for this growth I diverted the energy from the maintenance of my canopy, so that with each loss a leaf would fall until I was but a standing skeleton, bereft of cover, alone on the hillside; a naked reflection to man’s world. My arms raised in alarm to the sky; my silhouette stark and disquieting above the bare ridge, a permanent reminder of the mortality of spirit. Men would stand and look and wonder at the omens I represent, wonder at their own transience before turning back to their work in fear of their grim reality.

I started engraving the stories of the past into the new bands of my growth as a permanent reminder of where we are from. Just as when I was a child my first attempts at writing in my new form proved jarring and uncontrolled. But as I learned to control my body my hand improved. I etch out this story between here and the sky- from the morning-edge of moss, all the way around my core until my prose reaches the end of its annual thesis. What start as microscopic pores spelling out my words transform into widening grooves as they are pushed outwards by the next year’s growth. As I grow taller my template increases, giving me license to outlandish bursts of poetry and prose, until I finish this story and move onto the next- the grand narrative of the land itself.

Now I stand here, stark against the sky waiting for the day- and it will come- that I shall die again. I shall lay there in wait for the day, the day that has already come, that you open me up and carefully separate the rings from my trunk, from my branches, and from the buds that never develop into leaves- the day the saw carves into my story, my life. If you do this for an entire forest you can read the stories of the spirit, the great, all-encompassing story of this land; this whole absurd conglomeration of life. It is a library waiting to be read. But be careful, for the spirits themselves will be lost and all that will be left behind will be their stories; and once they are told they cannot be taken back, cannot be edited, and cannot be finished.