Only the Bones

Content warning: death/grief

I.

It’s early morning, and the air smells of honeysuckle, and burning.

Clear the ashes off the windshield. That’s how it is here these days. I turn the key, and the truck coughs into life, belching more smoke into a thin blue sky: the smell of dead things. You might have called it beautiful once. Something about the recursive nature of life.

It’s a long drive up to the mountains. I take 80, radio on soft in the background. Smoke is so thick the streetlamps are still on, beams of soft light cutting through dusky atmosphere. I pass a couple cars going the other way, flashes of copper with headlights on. Only a few this time, struggling through the murk, like a river choked with gasoline. Haze that seeps into your bones.

I pass Livingston after a while. Once we stopped at a strawberry stand here, a little wooden thing with faded white paint. Got there so early they let me pick some from the bushes out back, crouched down underneath the leaves, the dirt on my fingertips mixed with chatter and cigarette smoke from the workers -- they said I had a good eye for the ripe ones. You laughed and said maybe you’d let me work there for awhile, until the summer came and plants had regrown the berries I’d picked. Everything grows back, you said, even from only the roots.

The road starts to wind from here on out.  I’ve got one hand on the wheel and the other on the urn in the passenger seat, keeping it still as we move through the bends. For a moment, I consider belting it in, like a child, but I realize that’s silly. Nothing but ashes left, after all. Out my window, to the right, I can see the remnants of fire season: a procession of tree trunks, blackened at their base, tops gray with loose charcoal. The wind picks up, and the cinders are pulled into the breeze, dissolving. You used to tell me a little burning was good. That killing the underbrush keeps the roots from becoming kindling. But grief has swept through this entire forest, and only the bones remain. 

We’re climbing higher now. Past five thousand feet. Fragments of sky out of my windshield: defiant streaks of blue mixed into the haze. This is the part where I always woke up, having stumbled, bleary-eyed, into the passenger seat those early mornings, roused only by the soft sounds of my eardrums popping from elevation. Once, you shook me awake with all the urgency of some impending doom, or perhaps a miracle -- Look, you said, pointing your arm across my chest. Snowflakes tumbling into the canyon below. I wonder what you’d think of the ash that falls from the sky today, dusting the treetops far above my head in white. Maybe you’d wake me up and call it snow anyway.

I almost miss the turn in to the trailhead. Have to turn in blind on the corner, smooth asphalt giving way to a road of dirt, and gravel. You got it right every time, but it’s my first time alone and so I turn too late, lurching the steering wheel to the left and so the back kicks out and for a second we are weightless, floating endlessly as the dirt kicks up round my windows, all the smoke in the air and the tires scrabbling for traction against the loose gravel as the truck slides close up near the rock wall to my right, and we are the victims of entropy, or perhaps the way the cosmos refuses to suspend itself in time and so I think maybe I might never forgive you. But the moment passes and I feel the truck straighten out, and we drive down the trail until the path comes to an end.

II.

I can still smell the burning as I get out of the truck, clutching the urn to my chest. Sometimes I think it’ll never go away. They say it settles into your lungs after a while. Burrows into your chest. But here the smell of smoke is tinged with a bit of pine, because there are some trees in this little byway that the flames have neglected to burn. Even some shade -- rays that sketch a pattern, crosshatch, upon the hood of the truck: an elegy for sunlight. The beginning of the trailhead itself is almost imperceptible. It’s been months since we were here, and so the path we’d made from footsteps trampling thickets underfoot is gone, the regrown nettles digging into my legs as I work my way up the dirt path. But it’s good pain, I think. The universe acknowledging your absence.

It’s hard work going up the trail. Dirt pulls itself apart in loose clumps, and so with every step I slide back a little, threadbare boots struggling for purchase. I’m holding the urn under my arm, and a couple times I feel you almost slip out of my sweat-slicked grasp. After a while, all I can hear are my heaving, naked breaths, and the soft music of the grasses that brush against one another in the breeze. The smell of honeysuckle, again. Just out of reach.

Eventually, though, I feel the path begin to level out, the same way that it always did.  But as I look around the trail, everything seems different, with the light green of fledgling brambles replacing the telltale tree trunks I’d use to record our progress up the trail, the way that pencil marks run up a door frame. This is how a forest regenerates after disaster: new life immigrates amongst the ashes, and so all of the mourning is buried, unfairly or not. Perhaps that’s how it always goes. But my memory gets better with the distance, and so for a moment I imagine I am twelve years old again, your figure just out of sight round the next bend and the only smoke in the air from those smoldering morning embers roasting bad coffee in a tin thermos, and I think of the way that love is also a forest fire.

We’re nearly there, I think. Air is becoming clearer now, sky a brilliant marble blue. Scent of pine. Close my eyes and I think I can feel you beside me.

I clear the ridge and stop in my tracks.

Below me is the little clearing where we once spent our weekends, a little field of dirt and dandelion weeds, just flat enough to pitch a tent. Nothing exceptional, save for the fact that it was too ordinary to find without looking. Walk far enough into the distance and the ground gave way to the rest of the world: a view of the highway, winding its way through the forest and the towns below. Dots of light, and silver.

But in the field below all I can see are the colors: Flowers, thousands of them, blanketing the clearing in a mosaic of purple and orange and yellow and blue. Rows and rows and rows of honeysuckle, and as I stand, breathless, I catch a glimpse of the world reflected in your irises -- it’s the superbloom, you’d say. The way that the ash from a forest fire seeps its way into the soil, and everything is born again all at once and beautiful, even from only the barest of memories, burrowing their way into the dirt. Even from only the bones.

These flowers will die soon. The summer drought will starve half of them, and those that survive will be swept away by the next disaster that passes through this valley. Yet this land will forgive itself each time, recursive, endlessly, and so I think I will too. The bones sing to me, but not for grief. They sing for memory, for home. They insist on miracles. They tell me about you.

I throw your ashes into the wind, and the forest lives with the promise of spring.