WHERE YOU ARE

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You’re here, and this one is different.


It comes only in glimpses. The air is damp. The moss is as dense and muscular as the palm of a hand. Flag iris and twine rush smudge the horizon yellow and red, but you are in a sea of vivid green. There are no trees – unless those are trees darkening the slopes of the hills to your north. As far as you can see, only that strident green, the moss a static of fractal shapes defying focus. Distance collapses. The colour takes on the malevolence of outer space. There are no structures. There is no road. There are no bodies to make currents in the air around you. There is only green.


You can’t find a sensory handle. These impressions are coming to you heavily filtered as though through many rounds of Google translate. You try harder. You try to listen: is that the distant sound of a bird in the trees on the hills? Is that the bustle of a small creature making its life in the micro-forest of the sphagnum? It is not. It is wind rattling the iris leaves. It is water trickling indifferently.


What do you remember from the one paleoanthropology class you took? Come on, you remember. What happened a hundred thousand years ago? The ice advanced from the poles and sucked the moisture from the world. Everything was dry and cold. The human population narrowed down to maybe only a few thousand individuals. For a while there everyone in the world knew each other. A population bottleneck. Like cheetahs. Like bison. Like Aotearoa’s black robin, the current population of which all descend from just one bird –


You experience an existential nausea. It comes only in glimpses. The quiet is as hostile as the surface of the moon.


Say the bottleneck closed up. Say the ice took too long to recede. Say the cold stilled not just the voices of those few thousand huddled hairy ancestors of yours but everything that could move and make a noise, the metal ring of cellophane wings, the sigh of sea water on scale, the reedy voice of wind through fur and feather. Say it left only the tuneless chanting of the water running unseen beneath you, and the dry rattle of the wind in the leaves, and the pressing green silence of the endless moss, closing around you like a fist.


It comes only in glimpses because you can’t get a foot onto this type of ladder. It’s green unthinking photosynthesis all the way down. There’s no room for you here. You’re stuttering along the brink between potentiality and oblivion.

But before you wink out like the last candle in a cave you experience a brush of sensation: where you remember arms are now stretching fleshy spindles spearing upwards, multitudes of them, and for a moment you feel the ecstasy of cells in your myriad palms opening to the merciful sunlight. This is what it means to be moss. But human and plant shook hands and parted ways too long ago, and this form can’t sustain what you know to be yourself, and the rung on the ladder collapses under your weight and you fall back into inbetweenness again.