My house burned down while I was in New Orleans last week. Crabman died.
I cleaned it all up, now I’m sorting what’s left.
I wasn’t there to witness my demise so I have to imagine it. The silence. The bursting bulb, the shorted wire…whatever it was. I don’t know enough about electricity to guess.
I imagine Crabman and Hender realizing something’s wrong. Crabman trying to get out. Burning silently. The 100-year- old house smoldering like a campfire along with all the lead and plastics and chemicals. My tortoise knows not to inhale when he’s underwater. He can hold his breath for hours if he needs to. But he didn’t know he needed to. His little lungs, his little brain so affected by the chemistry that he could only walk in circles. Each inhale and exhale caused him pain. His throat was scorched. When a healthy turtle flips over on their back, they kick their legs immediately. Crabman would not kick his legs. And he was blind. I gave them permission to put him down through tears over the phone in the backseat of my Lyft, on my way to the airport, coming home from vacation early.
Hender survived. He ran away. I imagine him knowing that Crabman was dying. I imagine him circling around the doors, as if asking to be let out. I imagine him watching the flames grow and the way he looks when he decides to run. He ran down to the basement. When the firefighters found him down there, he dodged away, out of the smoking house. My mom found him, fed him, held him in her lap.
People think I have no boundaries because it takes a long time to get to them. Traveling vast distances through my mind and my body, I let them roam free, more free than others would. People roam so free they forget they are inside of me. They are stunned by the monster who guards the gate of my edge.
You and I do not have souls; we have The Soul. You sleep one night and dream one version of yourself. You sleep another night and dream another version of yourself. The third, another. Each one is one dream of you. And you and I are different dreams, different experiences of One Thing. One Organism. One Soul. Experiencing, understanding and interpreting itself through us and all the things we think. Life and the way we understand it is conditionally human and really doesn’t matter in the long run. Literally does not matter.
Or does it? The way we figure things, the way we figure things out and then build with materials we find here; other things that once were alive and then we altered it in ways only humans can, thus affecting this world we live in. To what extent. Does our doing matter more than the regulation of ants and bees and their changes? We shall see.
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