How to Be Human

I hang on a power line, staring up, crowding out the fear of falling through a study of clouds, crows perched on cumulous and staring smug; they have no fear of heights. I walk through four lives a day. Twenty a week. A hundred in a month. I climb through snapshots of people spinning memories, collecting figurines and baseball cards and minimalist art. I wade across lakes of drowned dreams, sometimes, of styles of sadness so deep you see light at the bottom, like a sun the size of a candle, shining up. I climb mountains to find people reveling in the thin air, balanced on smooth stones more at home lining riverbeds, dried or not, smiling through curves on calves and curling toes.

I cover my eyes in sunglasses, shake sweat off my face, wipe my cheek, plant seeds on the tops of poles in vain-ful hope the wood will remember its previous life, like arranging bones to resemble people–and leaving a ring in the ribcage, a flower on the forehead, tears along the wrists. You can’t reverse this.

But we try. We all try. We have to. We enshrine the memory, we build our muscle up, or we study the horizon with gear given from past lives. We are collections of collections. Evolution of a coal kept when all the flame is gone, ash blown away to fertilize the evergreens.

She said, she said once, when she died, she wanted me to build a swingset in a forest somewhere, as a gravestone, and blow her ashes among the trunks. So she could play, maybe, and remember how to be human again.