To Whomever Outlives Me
To whomever outlives me,
I write this preemptively, I am not dead yet, but I write as a matter of urgency. This letter concerns the matter of my body, and while it has flesh and sinew still able to claw its way across a keyboard, I use it to advocate for when it does not. I do not fear death, the church in its terrifying grandeur did not succeed in towering so high it instills in me the terror of ending up much further below. I don’t have a prediction for where I will end up after my lights are out but, strangely enough, this does not worry me either, my gut tells me it will be fine. I cannot lie, I worry a little about the things I will leave unfinished. I often find myself spiraling over the prospect of my ‘lasts’; last words, last song, last book, how will I know how to make them worthwhile? A satisfying conclusion to whoever I end up being? These are superficial worries though, and not the reason for my writing. I write for purely physical reasons. I am not concerned with the spirit, the soul, the ether, instead I plead for my mortal, corporeal self that will not have the luxury of living on in memory. I ask you to burn it, return it to the dust from whence it came, hot and dry and safe. Store it how you wish, place it as a centerpiece on a mantel, scatter me in the ocean next to which I was born, I do not care, as long as I am ash I will be alright. Do not put me in the ground, not whole, where my pallid skin drained of vigour will lie defenceless to rot. Sometimes I wake up screaming to visions of myself cloaked in dirt, my blood pooling at the bottom of my back, ambrosial, flesh ripe and tantalizing to the maggots and worms that live beneath the streets I used to walk. I dread the way they will gorge themselves on my body, swelling as they bore in through gouges they make in my skin with teeth smothered in bits of my disembodied flesh. I rue the way I will move through their writhing bodies, chunks of me that used to write and wander, parts of me that once were kissed and that knew only life. I cannot bear the thought of being within and becoming another creature in such a visceral way, an unmediated amalgamation into the tissue of another, what cannot be digested pushed right through and discarded, shit and decay. I am not trying to say that I am above the cycle of life, I want for my body to give back to the world that housed it for as many years as it did, but let me be absorbed, taken up through roots, folded into fruits or flowers, and breathed back into air. Let me feed mouths down the line, harvested or bitten straight from the branch, chopped or chewed or cooked. I want to first be green and above ground, given a second chance to be something to behold. Let me be sweet and juicy or bitter and herbal, I do not care, just do not let me be consumed whole and as I am.
Yours sincerely,
The soul on behalf of the body of Sophie-May Ward-Marchbank
Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal Hodson
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