Upon My Return

After ten minutes, my dog is happy to see me.

After a full day of work, there are chalk drawings on the sidewalk.
The dishes in the rack are dry.
A spider has begun a web in the corner of the window frame.

After a week the flowers by the house, recently vibrant and joyful, are thinner, browning, and falling from their stems.
There is mail to sort.
There is sour milk.

After a month there are new names on mailboxes, new pavement on the third street from home, new logos pasted over the old ones on the sides of city cabs.
A new cafe in place of an old one.
New bicycle racks installed by the city.

After a year young dogs with large feet and floppy ears are now lean and alert.
Carriages have replaced bicycles and subtle protrusions have replaced untroubled inversions.
Singles are couples and couples are singles.
Houses are different colors.

After ten years my childhood home is inhabited by strangers.
They don't know that they are my family.
That I once ate where they eat, slept where they sleep.
They don't know what I buried in the backyard, between the old stump and the lilac bush, what is even now being steadily sucked toward the earth's core as the soil turns, season after season.
My childhood friends have children who are now childhood friends.
They look at old pictures of us as we did of our parents, and as their children will, once they are estranged from one another.

After thirty years I don't recognize anyone.
Houses I played in as a child are sagging under the weight of their own roofs.
Faces I once knew are sagging under the weight of years, of lives lived, of loss and of gain (ha, ha).
Parents are dead.
Children are dead.
Century-old trees are gone, have been sacrificed in the name of progress, expansion, improvement.
Arrogant youths wander the streets, loud, as I surely never did.

After seventy-five years the slow things are coming to life.
Saplings of my youth are robust, strong, and proud to bear the weight on their limbs of youths again.
Even these are the children of other trees, and I bear to them a stern warning that their strength and confidence will pass, as mine has.

After two-hundred years my name has been spoken for the last time.
I am forgotten.
The rain and wind have worn clean the etching on my headstone.
I never existed.
I never awoke from my mother's womb.
Never entered the numberless ranks of men and women who cried, loved, ate, lost, walked, created, destroyed, laughed, scorned, spurned, rose, fell, had, had not, gave, received, withheld, assented, refused, denied, forgave, avenged, and who finally slept, and are even now being steadily sucked toward the earth's core as the soil turns, season after season.

And there I shall combust, and begin my ascent.
Yes, I am still here, and will return from time to time to assess the state of the earth, and my tome will never be complete.
I rise anew, renamed for each age, forgotten each eon, and freshly re-borne, whether on green grass or red placenta, to the land of the living.

And my dog is happy to see me.