______ wants me to bring her back a jar of dirt from the United Kingdom. I’ve heard people ask for this before; what’s the appeal of soil? Another friend joked that if I forgot, I could always scoop up some dirt from my own backyard and claim it was pure England turf. (I won’t, ______). But I could, really. No one sees the cartographers’ puzzle-line cracks cutting through the ground when moving from one state to another. And there is no piece left out. Every place has a name. The only way to find something new is to reinvent the old, just as it is with everything. Who knows if the spot where I scoop up soil for ______ will even be part of the United Kingdom at some point in the future?
(If you’re the kind who dies, like a name or a firefly, I could catch you in my mason-jar mouth—you’ll glow and then dim a little when I keep you, but that’s the nature of all things that stay in one place for too long. Breathe in, breathe out. You don’t even notice you do until you can’t, and then it’s throat burning, black heart-star vision beautiful.
If you’re something that breaks down out alone in the world, something ever-changing as soil—give me your erosion. Let me still you, lock you up from the weather for awhile. Show me the rocks you came from; let me sink into you and sift your horizons through my fingers. We will be more and less than names.)
I wish I'd taken some soil from Japan. There's something about it that just hints at more, you know? If you think of all of the people that have passed over it, all of the stories it's seen, all of the change that it's been there for...to me, it's kind of humbling. Even if the spot isn't in the UK in the future, she can say it was at one point. That's a story. It's a testament to permanence in a world of five-second attention spans.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree. I also think it's just a little...pretentious? (not exactly) to say something is "soil from soandso" when, like you said, so much has happened and is going to happen in that same spot. (Geez, I sound so hippy-dippy, but you can't really own or put a name to something like that, right? I guess nationality has always seemed a bit silly to me.) I'd argue there is no permanence.
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