A Walk With Cipriano.

Many years ago I wrote a piece of flash fiction which, reading it again now, hasn't aged horribly. I was inspired by the lavish prose and medieval Spanish setting of Gregory Maguire's Mirror, Mirror.

***

We walked together along the winding path, flanked by grass heavy with spring dew, geese waddling along the mossy banks of the lago, trees offering up on ancient boughs the crisp scent of almond blossoms.

“I think Papá is mad at me,” I ventured.

Cipriano’s eyes crinkled at the corners, the way they always did when he looked at me. “And why do you think so?”

“I did not speak much at last night’s meal. He wanted my opinion on everything, it seemed! And I had little to give.”

“You are anxious about the coming days.”

“I don’t want to leave.” I slipped my hand into his, which was rough with age; a hand that with its companion had spent much time lifted in offering or clenched in prayer. “I love my home.”

“Yes, our village, our Colina Verde, is worthy of much love.”

Nestled atop a paradise of Spanish hills, Colina Verde was my world. How could the town to which my father and I were returning—his native town, the premio de la reina—possibly know such perfection of light in the crest of dawn, or speak to the exquisite, half-imagined dangers of the dense forest below? Would ivy drape like plaits against cool stone walls; would the women allow me to scatter yellow narcissus petals across the chapel pathway?

“I don’t want to leave,” I whispered, and my ebony hair caught the wind, and spilled over my shoulder.

Cipriano’s grip tightened with affection. “Perhaps it is time to look at the world with new eyes, little dove. You are a child yet, but occasions such as these will strengthen you. You must learn to see the order of things.”

“What do you mean?”

“Consider the alder tree. In autumn it sheds its leaves and in winter stands shivering, a dead thing. Yet come spring, what do we find? The newness of life, of beginning again. Just last summer you remarked to me how tired the leaves become, a dull green wilted by the heat. They cannot stay forever on their limb, you see. They must die, to be born again.”

 I blinked at the wetness in my eyes. What did the alder tree have to do with the awful move looming in so near a future? 

His gaze became distant, as though the series of hills were a vision of his very words. “If you pause to consider all you are losing, you miss what can be the beautiful birth of something more. Even death, the ultimate end, is but a transformation, for nothing truly dies, my Ramira.” 

I would not understand his words until much later, but I listened anyway and nodded, in hopes of easing the glassiness in the Fraile's faded eyes. He came around soon enough, and patted my head. “Do not fear this change,” he urged. “Before long you will not be able to recall your winter of sadness, and happiness will spring from more than memories of this place.” 

“I will pray about it,” I offered.

 “Yes, good. And do not worry about your father. He remembers an afternoon when you sat with him in the cool shade and spoke of everything and nothing. The bad humors of Edmundo do not last.”

We walked quite a distance, then, in silence, and I struggled to interpret his words. To imagine all that I cherished of my lovely home receding behind me in deference to new wonders as fresh as the lemon trees; as warm as Papá’s voice during prayers on quiet nights. To accept an end, and a beginning, in which I could believe.

As we climbed the final hill, a figure, strong and gentle, came into view; sitting on a low stone wall, slices of apple in his hand. It was Papá, and he waved to me.

I am become Mars.

In the summer of 2016 I watched The Martian obsessively for a week, and then I read the book. I personally believe it is one of the greatest stories ever told. Not ever written, or ever filmed, mind you - but the story of a solitude more complete than ever in human history, on another planet, in a hostile but strangely indifferent environment, a man keeping alive through sheer force of intelligence, mental resilience, and the knowledge of all the ages before him... I think that's pretty great.

I then got a wild hair to rewrite the book in my own image. Not for publishing, obviously, I'm not an idiot. Just for myself. As a writer, I wanted more from the book. I saw where perhaps some deeper reflection or more finely-tuned emotional resonance was lacking, and I wanted to add it. Just for myself. To make something perfect. Something both scientifically marvelous and humanly devastating and edifying.

Anyway, I gave up about a hundred pages in. It was a rough year otherwise so the project was bound to fall away. But I enjoyed it. And I wrote a few excerpts that I'm really proud of. I will share one here.

As part of the mental toll that daily survival and isolation began to take on the main character, I wanted to show what wild fantasies might spring up in so singular a situation. It wasn't Earthly survival; it was "if I mess up I will no longer be able to breathe." It wasn't Earthly solitude, it was "no one else in the universe sees these constellations." He begins to dream of monstrous Martian inhabitants who keep a constant watch, and who draw ever closer with each dream, the astral embodiment of his relationship with death as it becomes likelier with each passing day. How might Mark Watney cope? What might keep him from going insane? Perhaps, nothing less than transcendence.

***

The dream again. This time they breached the Hab.

They tore through the canvas with a hunger no longer contained, pulling themselves toward my bunk with long grasping fingers, thin bodies vibrating with the looming satiation of the need to consume. I watched them lurch onto the covers, sheets squeezed in translucent fists, and I heard their painful airless gasps of realization that the human flesh they so long desired was not there. I watched from outside.

Because I was freed, finally, from the pathetic constraints of air and hunger and time; I was formless above the Hab while the creatures whirled about in confusion, unable to see or sense my new phase, unable to understand that I was now part of the very planet that had spit them forth in the relentless cold of those long-ago millennia. Every molecule formed my thoughts and my thoughts formed every molecule; I understood at last that the universe was alive and listening and remembering and speaking back, and I was deliriously joined to its infinitude.

Even now as I type this the night is still black and I still feel the irreversible change. I feel the sand in my skin; the rocks are my bones; my blood is a river of stars. Too long in the void, too long under the foreign sky, and the red planet has absorbed me at last. And I am cosmic. I am beautiful. I can never go home. I am become Mars.

When the heartache ends.

Last night I dreamt
my mother was a blade of grass
swaying in the shade of a willow tree

I would sit beside her and talk
of things she would want to know
She would bend her head and
graze my hand

Winter came and she grew brittle

An icy wind broke her and
she went away forever

When I returned in spring
and found that she was gone
I sat in the shade of the willow tree
and cried




(photo courtesy of www.trekearth.com )

Here, at the end of things.

At this point

all I dare dream of

is a chance to slip away

downstream

into a moment

that never ends.



(photo taken on the E.B. Jeffress trail along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina)