By Yossi Rosen
Prologue: Once upon a time, in a forest in California, a tree thinks, Drawing breaths and weaving a floral wreath of recollection. Fallen leaves, a sudden drop in the woods, from one to two to innumerable others. Pressed down against this identity as a template of what was, what could have been, an application of pressure. Like a mosaic of this and that and when and who. A fallen branch rippling in introspection. Afterward, out of consideration, the tree is incinerated. Sometime after a most curious boy thinks.
Chapter 1: My nanny, a hipster mom of three, thought it was sacrilegious to pass trees or any form of wildlife without worrying about them, like ignoring the facts, science even. Don’t be so blasé she would say, and I would respond, Stop being such a pedantic and grin though I had taken it personally. No doubt, she intended to save us from that same negligence, the sullied cult of humankind that we had become propagated in, to ravage the trees, the conceivers of oxygen, and Save the Earth posters. I knew what she meant, with deforestation and industry and all. She died, by the way, and I didn’t want to cry, so I didn’t, and stuffed my face with Chipotle and slept listlessly, my arms numb by sweat. The next day, I dealt with my grievance by going onto my desktop and searching for the future of Mother Earth. I ended up getting scarred for life. I went to school and pretended to be a communist because all teenagers want is attention. Right? Who knew playing the self-righteous zealot would accumulate better results than the quiet kid. After debunking denial, I quit carb-loading for antioxidants and began looking up videos on cures for insomnia. I became a vegan and started my social media page on leading a healthy lifestyle. Who knew campaigning for eating less refuse could result in sponsorships? I found that you can’t escape the social media appellation you acquire after 100k followers. On the tele, I began watching nat geo and broke my heart after seeing my monkey friend get eaten by a grouch of a hyena. I remember looking up how to save the monkeys, and finding a bunch of periodicals with features: things like The Last Species of such and such and Disaster at Sea: Global Warming Has Struck Yet Another… I remember seeing the world suffer like my life as temperatures transcended meteorological calculators and industries started realizing that they should care about more than their repletion. I remember seeing my neighbors, whom I used to hate stockpiling on the same cans of tomatoes, the watery ones I used to buy when I was in debt. The ones I had called rubbish and threw in their yard. I remember asking them and immediately regretting it. Eventually, the AC I thought was imperishable began to blunder, and my insomnia began threading through me, out of me, serrated like barbed wire. I remember growing a habit of chewing on Dixie cups as I stared at the Mirror, plastic rimmed, shoulder length, trying to decipher my face, my worn newspaper face, and contriving the precondition of the earth as a windfall we ought never to have plundered.
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