20 | Sophia Schwartz

I lay down on a grassy hill

Flip over onto my stomach

And thrust my fingers into the soil

They sink in until my hands and my arms

And my whole body dives into the earth

Under the ground

Now I am here in darkness

I step through a doorway

And find myself inside the root of a tree

I see the texture of informations etched into its walls

Stored like a library

A long narrow room 

It opens a hallway on my right

But I turn to my left and find

The room has a comfortable bed at the end of it

“This is where I die,” a voice inside me speaks

My voice

But I am not afraid

I go to lie down in the bed, I am snug and safe

Then, my body is broken apart into a million tiny pieces

And they begin transporting throughout the tree.

All the pieces of me, spread about,

Move upwards, out of the roots, 

Into the trunk, into the branches, and into the leaves

This is the transition point from brown darkness 

To the glowing green light of the leaves

Here, the pieces exit through stomata into the world

I am air now

Then, the air mixes with water

And the pieces are distributed into droplets

Looking closer, I notice that each raindrop holds a memory,

Just one slice of time, one piece of me

Eventually, when the circumstances are right,

All these little drops of me, now dispersed over the earth,

Will reconvene

And I will be reborn as a more-than-body of water

And my limbs will reach out in all directions,

Into the earth, into the air and across lands

To reach other bodies of water, to nourish

This will be the new me