I know what the taxidermy deer dream about

   Death and life are green and blue. Endless blue, invaded by the needle sharp peaks of these organic towers, crowding the border of the road, almost threatening to invade again. With time and stillness, they will. An army of nature’s strongest soldiers generations in the making. A chess board to a game only the creatures know. Further up into the true home, my home was long forgotten at this point, the trees grow leaner, sharper, like swords. In the dim light they appear as part of the shadows, grand shapes against a gunmetal gray. Battlefields of yellows and greens, sloped against the peaks and valleys. Roads and houses no longer appear dominating, but rather foreign. Quiet, small, waiting for the rust to finally capsize and invade the human plastic. Here the dark is lovely. Between the trees it weaves like a second sun, blackened but all the same warmth, inviting to step in. Only those who are born for the woodland’s sun shall be accepted. The houses are meek here. Scattered about in the social anxiety that permeates between the miles of dense armory. Each large patch of those skinny, horned trees with its many limbs in a spinal-like structure, clustered around. The size of it all, these enormous trees. It’s hard for me to look away. I sense something bodily with the landscape, a pattern so ancient and embedded into the dawn of creation that I’d rather not assume that anyone could decode it.

    Out here, mankind is easily overtaken by the woodlands. Only a mere afterthought on the world. Perhaps the frequent hide and go seek of houses and sheds is why I am attracted to the idea of fleeing into that lovely dark. Everywhere I could hide. I see shelter beyond the tree line.  Even now as I casually scratch the swelling mounds that mosquitoes and other small invaders of the air caused onto me by trespassing, I intend to sneak in once again, even if it takes a thousand blood sacrifices. My wish is someday to be a permanent resident of that lovely dark. In the north, no matter where you go, the fluorescent lights will never outshine the visceral glow of the woodlands, the foreboding thickets, creeping in like water into every crevice. Humanity appears to be affected by the woodlands, the power in the soil, as many of the establishments shapeshift to match the landscape. Manufactured mimicry. Almost, but not quite. It could never replicate what was here before and what always will be here. Never replicating God as it is impossible to. The villages are in an act of a Cold War between themselves and the trees. Borders and backyards in a stalemate between a neat lawn and the untamed undergrowth. The fountain of youth isn’t a fountain, nor is it water. I am convinced one will feel ages younger if they step into one of these woodland clusters, even on a trail, nothing but miles and miles of monolithic beings.

  The woods devour. Always starving. I want to believe that if I walked too far it would devour me, too. Some of those estranged boxes of wood and steel would serve as a surface grave. Out here, human society is awkward and clumsy, sleepy and rushed all at once. As if a toddler threw their model toys all around the room, cars and farm equipment and trailers dot the landscape like stars. You and I are tenants on this planet until the lease is up and we are evicted from our bodies, returning back to the ground from which we eat. I feel like one of those rescue cases with wild animals, and this is the buildup to my reintroduction into my habitat. Except the release never happens, and I stay in the cage as they drive me away from home and into another man-made enclosure to keep me for a little longer - the exotic pet that looks too much like a domesticated species until it bites one too many limbs.

   And even as I sat against the lukewarm lake water on that idealistic clear day, with a healthy ray of sun on top of my section of the world. Absent of bloodshed, famine, gunfire, and all the other plagues of Earth. Yet with all that I achieved I felt that same hole in my stomach sink deeper with me into the sand. I began to worry about things far away from me and people that were no longer walking alongside me, and friends that were hours away and friends that were continents away. There is a sense of autonomy here that makes me itchy, makes me want to rip my skin off. Skin that doesn’t lend me warmth and layers to fend off bugs. A stomach that doesn’t digest right and teeth that ache from cold water.

  You realize the power of  teeth. As I realize the power I would have in those small organic alleyways where the power line disappears between the tree branches and the poles march onwards, like a slice was left in the unbreaking barrier of woodland. I see them as doorways that beckon. Makes me taste how disgustingly bland my life has been so far. A cardboard’s dream. Bland, all of it. I was born in a fish tank too small, and I suffered the warping of my biology only because they fed me consistently.

Places where I feel like a trespasser in someone else’s memories.

Old hills and even older views, time is trapped in a moss-infused bottle chalked with fumes of oil, rust and smoke. Doused in liquor. Roads that are cousins in their shape and curves. 

Houses with pitch black portals for doors.

I think about cupping my worn hands around the face of someone I think about often, feeling the radiating human warmth, another heartbeat under my palms other than my own. Physical proof that the love I have found is real.

I want to answer those buried questions, dig them up through their eyes, and say,

“The meaning of being is always up to the person, but it will always go back to us. 

The meaning of living is us.”