#@inkskinned

Those who use this phrase usually have an answer for you, but they have their own temple, and you need not let them dictate your life, your virtues, or your praise. How many temples does their god require? And should we praise one so greedy?

Do you want to sing your words of worship? Do you feel like dancing will bring praise to your values? Do you sometimes sit in your temple with closed eyes and meditate? Or perhaps like me you write your prayers and cast them into the void hoping that they will reach someone, and that they may send something in return so that you know you are not alone?

Do you worship a god of blood, of war, of terror? Do you praise the struggle against death, or the benefits of community, or the bounty of the world? Perhaps it is silence, peace, and ease that you hold dear?

Whatever it is that you have enshrined within your temple, engraved into the boney pillars and the domed ceiling, painted in a thousand colors on the mural above the altar, and filtering the light of the world through those two stained glass windows above the door from which your songs (or silence) ebb forth... Be sure to act within your temple in a way that glorifies those things.

I have a fascination with death. Not how it happens, not what happens after. I have a fascination with how death is handled by the ones left living.

I talked at length about it in the Egyptian gallery with you, surrounded by bodies misplaced. "Most of history we learn through the way we treat our dead." Which is true, I think, for the most part.

We have written and oral history. We have the skeletons of buildings and cultures left behind for us to interpret. But before that, before the corpses of civilizations we're still able to uncover, we have our own.

The oldest body ever found is argued to be 230,000 years old. Hundreds of millennia, a culture so lost to time and decay we can't hope to uncover significant artifacts.

Our bodies become the artifact. The way we were buried, where, with what, with who. Was there care put into our final resting spot? Was there effort put into the ends of our lives?

Most often, there was. Our bodies tell our descendants our status. Our injuries. Our community. Our loves.

Perhaps they'll debate. Perhaps they'll misinterpret. But millennia later, your body might tell someone how we lived. How we loved. What we cared about at our core. What we thought would help us after death. What we thought we'd want to continue our comfort. What the living needed to let us pass on from their lives.

You tell me you still think about what I said.

Many people talk about becoming a tree when they pass. It is a beautiful notion, one I've considered. A natural, living reminder of a life lived. A place for their loved ones to share a connection with. In a way, the continuation of a life; albeit in a different form.

But I don't want to become a tree. I'd rather become a forest.

Maybe it's a notion toward the state of our world. The lack of top soil is one of the prevalent factors of our declining environment. The way we've stripped it of the nutrients of decay.

There are ways to decompose naturally. In the ground with nothing but a natural shroud is the oldest and easiest way. A new, human composting method has been created for an urban option when the easiest is unavailable. An alternative to cremating. One that can give back to the earth.

My body might not be one that tells the story of my time alive on this planet. My body might tell a joke, or rest peacefully, or ideally decay away. My DNA will dissolve into nitrogen and an assortment of other elements. I will become no different or better than the dirt that lies around me. What was me will become something else entirely.

it begins with your hair falling out in chunks in the shower and you think - it wasn’t supposed to be like this. it begins with you stealing the money from your mother’s wallet, and going to stay the night at rebecca’s house (the one with the big eyes? yeah, her). you sleep on a park bench - you and rebecca haven’t spoken in years. 

it begins with her finding the little black box you keep in your backpack. you see, she saw the light slowly dying behind your green eyes as the powder turned your blood into fire. she saw it before your father, who puts whiskey in everything these days. she saw it before your brother (you two used to be so close). she saw it even before you.

it begins with her trying to save you, with her stroking your tired face until you’ve thrown up all the hurt, all the anger, and then she flushes it down the toilet. it begins with her staying up all night, wondering where you are, praying that bad man hasn’t yet caught up with your lies - i’ll get you the money. i just need more time.

my best friend corners me afterwards, she knows, of course she does, smirks at me. “you lied,” she says, conversationally. “yeah.” “i thought you never lied?” she raises an eyebrow. i don’t lie about my opinions, about the things i choose to say. “about this, i do.”

it goes like this: a game of truth or dare and a “yes” through a smile when she’s asked if she’s lost her virginity, the reptilian eyes that cut towards me as i shrink within myself, exit the game a few rounds later because some of these people know far too much about me as it is.

she comes up to me again, maybe a little drunk now, i sigh. “i may have let something slip?” she starts, my mouth twitches. “did they put two and two together?” i ask. “i don’t know how they would have. but maybe,” she admits. i roll my eyes and my veins turn to ice. she owns the only two of my secrets i want kept and candy rolls out of her mouth every time she opens it.

“i’m sorry,” she says. “it’s fine, it doesn’t matter anyways,” i say. it’s the kind of thing i don’t want people to know. it’s the kind of thing kept hidden even if it doesn’t mean anything and if everything stays the same. it’s the kind of secret you admit twenty years later at a reunion that everyone’s shocked by. i shrug.

“i’m really sorry,” she repeats. we pass the boy with the lizard eyes and he grins at me, sickly sweet, accusatory smile. i give him my best puzzled glance, try not to trip while walking past. months later, he’ll ask me about it, and i’ll glare at him until he apologizes.

“it’s okay,” i repeat. “i mean secrets are never kept forever, people were going to find out eventually.” only the two of us knew, of course, so it wasn’t a given. but whatever. a year later, we’ll finally say it out loud and admit it to ourselves, but not today.

we get back to our shared hotel room. the beds are just short of comfortable and the thin covers are overly warm in the blistering rainforest heat. i change into the lightest sleeping clothes i brought. she settles into her own bed a few feet over, hair an unbrushed mess. “at least take your contacts out,” i sigh.

minutes, hours pass. “do you want to cuddle?” she asks, no preamble. i turn over on my side, trying to pretend to be asleep. i can hear her nose scrunch all the way from my side of the room. “i’m sorry, okay?” she says again. “it’s fine. c‘mere.” i always give in.

it’s too hot for this, i think, but she manages to tangle all of her limbs through mine, latching on like a koala. my hand finds it’s way to her hair, starts brushing out the knots. i might have kissed her forehead, she might have been asleep. we wake up and nobody knows for sure.

and it goes like this: i always get an extra box for food because i know she never finishes hers, and she always shows up an hour late for plans because she fell asleep. i call her at night to tell her to stop procrastinating by stress-cleaning her room, and she brings me coffee at school in the mornings. she steals all of my clothes even though she owns forty different sweaters and if i ever ask her to pick me up, we have to end up going back to her house so she can finish getting ready.

the sun set a day ago and my mouth is filled with a taste somewhere between blood and you. actually, it’s exactly like that day you pulled me out of the water, i almost drowned, busy trying to see something down at the bottom. something that looked a bit too much like me. you pushed air back into my lungs and i coughed so hard my spine felt the weight. you kept me from there on out, said you liked me but i think you were afraid because of all the words neither of us would say.

here, i’ll say them now.

I send this in the aftermath, knowing that nothing I could say will change your mind about me, about what I did. I’m tired, and I’m angry at you, but I’m more angry at my self-sabotage. At my inability to keep a good thing from devouring me, from becoming me, until I’m desperate to get away. “You’ve always had a very obsessive personality,” my mom told me, “be careful your version of him doesn’t consume you.”