Weekly Writing – August 19 2023

I noticed the first bee crawling out from between my ribs two months ago. It balanced for a few breathless seconds on the titanium strut, cleaning its wings, then launched itself into the flax field I was walking through like a falcon from the nest. Soaring on the same imperative, to find food and then return.
I didn’t think it would. I was keeping up a brisk pace then, ever northwards, and must have been just a lucky perch, a moment’s passing respite in its busy life. I thought – but three flew back into the safe cage of my ribs as I walked crosswise to the sunset down a faded gravel ribbon of road.
I should have driven them out. Insects and what mechanisms I still have are a dangerous mix. But I’d been walking for so long without any sign of anything more living than I. Walking under watery yellow moonlight, knowing they were asleep in my chest, felt like being more alive still.
Two months later, I’m heavier and more whole with the nest they’ve built. My chest is papery and frail and full of a buzzing heartbeat. I was healthier as a naked ruin – the dripping honey or an errant buzzing body is bound to short out something one day.
But I no longer walk as strictly northwards as I did. I detour to find meadows, fields of crops gone wild with flower, and they burst out in busy, grateful song to do their work. I’m not as worried now about whether I’ll reach my destination, that damned, doomed northmost city, before I die.
Maybe that’s how it feels to die. Maybe it starts with not caring anymore – for some people, as long as there have been people, it has ended with hosting more new, different life than your own. Becoming incompatible with your own body. But I walk through fields of flowers I wouldn’t have seen, found, cared about before, and I carry a city in my chest. And I don’t care, if dying is the only way, now, to not be alone anymore.