Last Night in the Physical World

Death, Trees, and Days Without Internet

Hello, friends! It’s been a minute. I finished a rough draft of my novel at the beginning of April and took the rest of the month to refill the well, just read everything I could get my hands on. My goal is to post more regularly going forward. I’m running a creative experiment on Saturdays—computers are off limits!—and so far I like what it’s doing for me (even if this particular post is a bit dark).

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Yesterday, during the early evening, I stopped on a street called Memory and began searching for the grave of Richard Hugo. All the streets in the Missoula Cemetery are named things like this: faith, hope, charity. The cemetery was much larger than I expected, lushly green with towering trees, stones of different shapes and hues barnacled with golden moss and lichen. I was alone, save for a white sedan parked on another one-word street, and I watched for it to drive off, thinking that would be my signal to go. I was under the impression that the gates would soon close —dusk, it said—but there was, I shit you not, a gothic fog and heavy grey clouds. There was a small break in the strange weather, and I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for.

I have rather bad social anxiety, although you probably wouldn’t know it if you met me. Cemeteries are a good place to not talk to people, although that had nothing to do with this particular outing. I have designated Saturdays for my “artist dates”; this is an assignment from Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way where you are supposed to take your inner artist out (just yourself) on some sort of adventure. This could be starting a new knitting project, going to a movie, buying a small trinket at the thrift store. You get the idea. Moreover, I have designated Saturday as a day of computer abstinence. An internet Sabbath, if you will. But really, it’s the whole computer. Last week, I decided it was time to delete my Reddit account, as I am paring back all internet usage, and so I spent my last twenty minutes scrolling r/collapse, which is a special place bordering on unhinged, and then hit deactivate and went to bed.

The next morning, I left my computer charging on the desk and had the sudden impulse to check my email or the news or anything, but instead I let it sit there. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself, and I felt the same way that I sometimes felt when I’d forgotten my phone at home or those first few weeks when I found myself not holding a wine glass at a party. Naked and uneasy. But really, what I noticed was the silence. No chatter. If I wanted to write, I’d have to use my notebook. I could read a physical book. I could leave the house.

So, yesterday, Saturday, I wrote a poem at the kitchen table and read Never Let Me Go, and then I waffled back and forth about whether I should go to the cemetery or if it was too late, but I had written down the address the night before just in case, and so I headed out.

I was supposed to be looking for the name Hugo in big block letters, but there were so many headstones, and so I gravitated towards the ones where people had left flowers. No luck. Just loving friends or family members leaving hyacinths and roses. Some were real flowers and others were fake. There were placards posted around, and I checked a few, but all I found were the histories of colonists and their trading posts, the verbiage dancing around the real histories of this place in dizzying fashion. At some point, I realized that I was not going to find what I came for. And so I passed over more names until I stopped looking all together and started thinking about stories and poems and what it might be like to be locked in a cemetery over night. (If I am being cagey with my descriptions and ideas, it is only because I am saving them for other forms and genres).

I am not particularly afraid of cemeteries or even death, but as far as burial practices are concerned, I don’t think the cemetery is for me. Unless, of course, I am interred next to Hemingway in the Ketchum cemetery. That will work just fine.

Of course, I have a healthy fear of death, just like anyone. I think it’s what keeps us going. I think it’s at the heart of all great art. I am afraid of pain and I am afraid of losing people close to me. Personally, though, I think the idea of living forever is much more terrifying. And perhaps I am all right with it all because I always thought I’d just go on as a tree. There’s a lot of comfort in becoming a birch or a maple or a chokecherry tree! I don’t know which; I haven’t decided.

When I stopped looking for names in the cemetery, I looked at the trees and the soft ground and the moss and how wet and beautiful everything was. Something happened recently—a good thing!—that I can’t say much about now, but it basically means that I don’t know where I’ll be next year. But isn’t that just par for the course? That’s me. I can never stay put. And walking through those grounds, it dawned on me that I’ll be in the ground one day and then that will be the longest I stay anywhere. Unless I am one of those trees that seeds at great distances.