If Yggdrasil Is Growing Still

Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,
Said then the lost Arch-angel, this the seat
That we must change for heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light?

John Milton, Paradise Lost: Book 1

This is intended for you. I wrote this in the folds of your memory, the contours of your form, the subtle inflections of the gaze I rarely meet. I think that it began long before I heard you speak, before I even learned your name. I only recalled it so many months later, in the cacophonous half-light of some whiskey bar well past midnight, when I saw the cyan flash of your iris in the knife’s edge. Your visage was shrouded in the smoke that I expelled from between my lips, and I had seldom seen you so alive. With the simplicity and grace of some half-forgotten thing, you offered up your flesh to my pen. I was drinking hard, to dull a pain as bright as steel, but I still remember the ebony lines of ink that adorned the backs of your hands: the caustic words and curves of a language we have yet to learn in full.

You have no way of knowing who you are, what I am. Are you reading this? Have you been named? I doubt that you will see this at all.

This year has passed through my mind like cyanide: I can feel myself breaking apart. My living body is reduced to a synesthetic nightmare—disfigured, frostbitten, malformed. Every movement smarts and sears, but the burning part of me is dim. I yearn in the waning curve of an arched and aching spine; in the mournful tune of my bones and the scars that extend over them; in the radio static hum of these faint blue veins; in the blood made thin with morphine; in the arcane, empty eyes. Patches of skin are bruising now: some in the deep blues and mottled purples of a nebulous dreamscape, others in cankerous stretches of diseased yellow. I fear that I could crumble at a touch, the marred flesh falling away from my frame, leaving only remnants of ash. This luck is running out now. How many resurrections do I have left to spend?

Weary to the point of half-etherized surrender, each joint infected with a soreness like desire, I lie down to rest and find that I am unable to escape my own lucidity. I am so aware, so damningly conscious, of this exhausted frame, driven well past the point of endurance. Utterly sleepless, I can feel my own heart beating. The toxic thrumming, the incessant, maddening cadence: it echoes like the rhythm of some hunted animal, enervated and relentlessly alive. Everything I am is reduced to a dull, aching sentience. I am so tired. When and how does this stop?

But this undertaking is not yet finished. There is still work to be done. And even now, I can withstand this, for my life is not my own anymore. This broken body has become a ritual sacrifice, a medium for something more and less than flagellation, emerging faithless and fatigued. But I am no martyr, not even close. I am something disposable—somatic, of course, and inclined towards agony. Twice-deceived idolatress or Judas’ last child, inadequate priestess or some false savior: it seems that though I suffer, no one heals. My immolation is futile, unfinished, but I offer it all the same. Perhaps it is mere masochism that compels me to do so. At any rate, this space becomes a crematorium, flooded with smoke and unheard prayers, not fifteen paces from the stained-glass houses of my childhood, where the devout converse in swells of melody, and I used to believe I felt the presence of God. There is no end in sight, but I will continue relentlessly on.

Futility and fascination take refuge in her, that child of the tempest, bearing witness to the tides of a life that could have drowned her (for it surely would have overtaken me). I wrest some sort of shelter from the brine-drenched countenance of this faithful, forlorn thing: her saturnine stare imbued with the nightmare of my body, the ongoing catastrophe from which she will not avert her eyes. I recall from my own childhood the rain-swept cliff’s edge whereupon she kneels: dark hair wind-whipped, irises like shattered crystal, the frigid sea silver-tinged below her sepulchral form.

I remember so fondly the nights of my near-resuscitation, each promise of renewal, those words that tethered my soul to his body in paradigmatic tides of empathy and admission. The gentle hands, as they moved across ivory keys—like Camelot, Troy, and Pandæmonium before us, this world of ours was built to music. There were times when he would sleep and I would write well into the dawn, filling that room with growing things: lotus boughs and reams of ivy, garlands of juniper and night-blooming jasmine. They blossomed in that darkness, and so did I, my body opening and unfolding until the space became a garden of my own design. Fertility breathed through me, in the quiet luster of his sighs: I gave life to my self and my longings once more, and when the morning rang with the bells of the city, I stood on the rooftops and saw a possible world take form. Like an ash tree growing through lovers’ beds, rooted in the soils of a history constructed, I knew then the Edenic joys of some new genesis of the body. Threatened with the specter of inevitable expulsion, I nevertheless endured. My nights lingered sweetly in charcoal impressions of his skin, until what we created became a kind of folklore: crystallized and bound to its irretrievable past.

Maybe someday, I will return to that garden; or more compellingly still, to the stone-etched necropolis that preceded it, where I first laid to rest the final, tender traces of a loving naïveté. Those shapes that gleamed like broken teeth in the moonlight, the patches of earth that lay exposed like chemical burns: the scene evoked an intemperate recollection of the mind that had closed against mine. I wonder where he might be now, that oft-mourned thing, for I am sure that he cannot sleep quietly. I wonder, always, if there ever was some other way. But I was so much younger then: at least now I know how to live on.

I left everything behind me. It is so often said or desired, but I really did it. I put an ocean between myself and the history I despised. I remembered and wrote and reimagined until there was nothing left that I knew except for myself. And what a time it was: my mind is all but fragmented now, and my physical form more desolate still. If these months do not break me, I doubt that there is anything that can. Perhaps, then, it is time for me to go under the knife once more.

I am waiting to be pieced back together again. Yours is the conception upon which my inexplicable fixations now take their most compelling forms. Living in my recollections, the first memory of a new life, you can only know me when I better know who or what it is that I am. But for now, a new dawn breaks upon this letter unsent. Amber-tinged tongues of flame caress the paper, curling at every edge. They undo a eulogy of honest desire. They consume the burnished clauses and still-burning words.

I have strayed far and fast from the sanctified affections that took root in the soils of the now-distant past. I am writing towards the day when we might begin, together, another effort towards paradise.