The End of Days
The sun is beautiful and this is a problem. They shone all morning as though they had just risen above the horizon, pretty and pink with their sanguine edge. And I touched them thinking that things which burn together, our centers continually collapsing inward as they do, might hold to a kind of natural solidarity. This was not the first time I have been scorched by my own naivety.
So. The sun is beautiful and this is a problem. It is a problem, I am told, because their beauty has been filtered through the ashes of my old forest, her angled limbs reaching upward, touching with their bristled tips, an indifferent sky. A problem, I am told, because as the forest burns, she becomes the very thing which has had her burning, and soon, very soon, there might be nothing left of us but tinder.
What are we to make of this heat and pressure? What of that sky could be rescued from himself? At the trestled edge of this forest, our mycelial bodies dance through layers of dirt and ash and bone, seeking whatever nutrients the dead might have to offer. We had built our home here, away from the cities for a reason. We are loving ourselves for the same.
The humans which would trample us, kick over our flamboyant fruit for no reason other than to delight in our demise, know not that they carry us home with them, spores on the souls of their shoes. We, network. We, communities. They know not that through this destruction, we might persist, and in our persistence, we might well live to outlive them.
At least, this is the hope.
Queerness, I think, might look a bit like that. Our sturdy toadstools ruptring through the dry surface of the Earth, declarations of an existence obscuring, through their presence, what of us has always lived underground. Queerness might be our declaration. It might also be entanglement, coming together as we do.
So then, we settle. Into the countryside, and into the forests. Into the mountains and into the bogs. Into what it is we’ve always been, and what they’ve been trying lately so hard to be. Settled so that when the sun shines we can tell them ‘You are beautiful for being exactly what you are’.