becomes the dream
by Loren Kim
A leaf in summer over a week turns gold then red and falls, pinwheeling down into coarse, sharp-edged grass. It quivers in the breeze, shaking in short pulses for a time before being snatched by a gust. Thirty yards and a moment away it lights on weeds grown up along and the detritus trapped by a rusty and twisted relic of a barbed wire fence. There, next to a sun-yellowed Hershey’s wrapper and a discarded cigarette pack’s brittle cellophane, the leaf goes unnoticed. Its fading is out of step with the normal order and expectancy of things. It is trapped by the wind.
That wind has been blowing since my earliest memories.
*****
We were as young as you are once. I’ve known your Dad since fifth grade. But your Mom I didn’t really meet until later, when he was in college and I was floating around between New York and Montana. Long distance I’d heard that your Dad broke up with his high school girlfriend and had heard, somehow whether by phone or letter (yes, letter) that he’d met your mother at a party on the lake over the summer. Home for something, that is when I met your Mom, 1985 or so. As young and as pretty as you are now.
She was down to earth, bright, drank and smoked, smiled a lot, laughed a lot. We all loved her. But we didn’t have a good handle on the implications of our choices back then. It wasn’t so much, “Ah, that could never happen to us,” as it was never a consideration. Yeah, yeah we knew smoking was bad for you but cancer or any other disease associated with it was just so far away from us, distant unimaginable lands. None of us knew. How could any of us have known what our choices, lineage, and lifestyles would contribute to so soon into the future? Shit we could control and shit we couldn’t and mileage has value. With mileage our choices change.
*****
The leaf continues to quiver in short pulses. A pitted barb has worked its way through what was pliant and green. It lies impaled under painful sunlight, every detail of its fading illuminated. And in the fading, its complex chemical constituents begin to denature, to change, to break down, to become elemental. The wind steals some of this elemental dust and scatters it on what must seem, at that scale, the volume of space.
*****
It’s frustrating to me that the universe occurs at scales we can’t imagine, not just the vast scales, but the incomprehensibly tiny scales, too, where really strange and wonderful things occur. The leaf is losing itself to the wind as elemental dust, carbon, sodium, oxygen. These are the elements, freed by the mold and bacteria consuming the leaf, that are lifted away in the wind. These elements go home to the universe, where they participate more fully than the leaf ever could in its whole. They drive the universe, of which life must only be a poor substitute for a nuance. The elements, with their own constituents popping in and out of existence, plying hard-to-understand dimensions, slipped the mortal coil long ago when they were first created in the furnace of stars. We do return to the universe as elements, scattered, unconstrained.
*****
All things come and go. But when something occurs out of the expected progression, we value it differently. I’m not sure that your pain would be any less if things were happening within the normal. However, we are conditioned by experience to accept a gradual decline into old age and death. Maybe it’s because the sequence of events is so compressed for you, what would normally happen over decades and would go unnoticed, is happening within the space of months. Slowing down, slowing down, slowing down, slowing down. Stopped. Gone. That’s normal. But you are there watching under that sun’s warmth and callous brilliance.
*****
M (8:40 pm): Gregger, it’s over. Just thought I’d let you know. There are no words.
G: I know. It just happens?
M: About twenty minutes ago
G: You okay?
M: Yeah. No.
G: You gonna be okay?
M: Probably … (he begins to cry) just thought I’d let you know.
G: Ah Spark …
M: I’ll let you go (he continues to cry)
*****
Your Mom’s been awake but only somewhat present. She’s having trouble swallowing again. The fear and anxiety you’ve watched too long has gone. When she is present, you can see that she understands that the time has finally and absolutely come, and she must leave you. She seems quiet, drifting. Her thoughts are cloudy with drugs and departure. You’re too smart for me to say anything saccharine. The elements that made her will be subsumed by the universe. You will continue on.
BIO: Loren Kim is a New Hampshire–based writer whose work explores consciousness, pattern, and the beautiful, unsettling edges of human experience.