Our Earth Will Soon Be a Graveyard

My Blue Heeler begs me to rise out of my bed and escort her outside, as I have been in an emotional slump all day. Each headline I doom-scroll across is worse than the last, sending me further into my spiral and sinking deeper into my bed rotting. I cannot seem to shake the image of Demartravion “Trey” Reed out of my skull, limbs shattered and hung from an oak tree on a Mississippi campus. A modern-day lynching, I wonder what this fucking world has come to. Each day becomes worse than the last, with a new defeat plastered across my screen as women lose more of their rights, children are further terrorized by AR-15s, and Palestinian children hang by their intensities in Gaza. My dog stares at me further, tugging on my sweatshirt sleeve that hasn’t been washed in days. Please don’t be like me, please brush your teeth and do your laundry. I groan, picking the crust from my eyes and stretching my twenty-one-year-old bones that feel as if they are pushing eighty. My apartment hallway hits my nostrils with a cloud of cat piss, the new neighbors refusing to clean the urine-soaked litter from their trash can that dwells lazily outside of their unit. I kick a cicada carcass beneath my house slippers, dwelling by the front door of the building. There is so much death everywhere. It is difficult to find delight as I sink further into my melancholy.

The grass is damp beneath my poor choice of shoes, seeping into the fuzz and grazing my bare feet. My dog doesn’t seem to care about the murky puddles, splashing through the sludge and shaking it onto my sweatpants. I roll my eyes subconsciously, gaze drawn towards the dreary sky. A hoard of dragonflies swarm above my frame, as the blackened clouds weep. A storm is brewing like bubbling tea in the kettle. It is almost as if the insects know something, as if this world has become so warped that they know this is not normal. They are not desensitized to tragedy as America is. The thunderheads seem to graze the bottom ozone later, drifting towards the chaos. As if each molecule within them is being dragged down, as if the lost lives on earth are connecting the heavens to the human. The recent lynchings, grotesque genocide, cultural divide. Hundreds of dragonflies dance, but not from joy. They preform a mourning ritual, wings fluttering as a prayer to the planet. A plea for compassion, for empathy, for the return to our roots. If only Adam never emerged from the dust. If only we had left the garden untouched. The mortal greed would cease to exist, and the wildlife would finally know peace. I snap out of my philosophical delusion to the ringing of my ears, my dog discovering a heard of burrowing squirrels. She disturbs their peace, sniffing out the wet leaves where they once rested.

I continue my walk along the path, stumbling across an old graveyard, out of use for at least a few decades. The tablets are enclosed within an iron fence, vines creeping up the gate, almost discouraging me to enter. Moss glazes over the headstones, forgotten to all but the ghosts and roly-polies. Names now illegible- once so full of life, even in death. To think that these bodies once had souls, once had entire lives. Poets, mothers, farmers, thinkers, explorers. I continue my stroll, admiring the woodland surroundings. The tips of the trees are kissed with maroon lipstick, watercolor paintbrushes sprinkled along the graveled roads. A sign of autumn’s beginning, but the year’s end. Perhaps there is delight, even in tragedy. These minuscule moments of joy are the only thing keeping me sane, keeping me alive. The squeamish squirrels scatter like scattered glass as I draw closer, scurrying beneath the tree line and hidden from the light rain fall. I begin to lose myself in a cloud of thought, contemplating how peaceful this world would be without the evil of humans. Even if my species goes extinct, our mother earth would still live on. Would that be so tragic? Skyscrapers overgrown by greenery, much like a worldwide Malaysian Forest City. I think of the Biomimicry Life’s Principles, how overgrown the national parks would become, how clean the air would be- free of smoke and chem trails. The flourishing of a society that returned to its roots, evolving and adapting without mortal limitations. How life was supposed to be lived, intended to thrive- even in death. Each walking corpse today will someday become a bacterial feast, the end signifying a cycle of beginning. My dog whines at me, as if she notices my brain, stuck in a thought loop. She rubs her damp fur against my sweatpants, leaving a trail of mud and leaves along the pilled fabric. I rub my eyes with an intense pressure, trying to shake my dreams away. Colors and shapes spiral through my closed eyes, warping the wilderness into a faux-mushroom experience for just a second. It allows me to breathe, to ground myself from the anxiety that always seems to creep and crawl into my ears, snaking into my frontal lobe. Just breathe. Breathe.